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Remember the song about the cat? Well, the cat came back the very next day / Oh, the cat came back, they thought he was a goner but the cat came back / He just couldn’t stay away… Well, it won’t be official for a few weeks, but the word landed yesterday: Rahm Emanuel, among the most despised individuals within and without Democratic Party politics, will be named U.S. ambassador to Japan. The cat came back, and has apparently landed a key assignment in the foreign service.
It’s hard to know where to begin explaining why Mr. Emanuel is so perfectly despicable: There is simply so much to say. The groan that passed through progressive politics upon this announcement was low, and slow, and thoroughly exasperated. President Biden had been sternly warned not to include Emanuel in his administration, and almost four months in, it seemed as if he had listened. He did not.
Given that the police murder of George Floyd (among so very many others) and the subsequent conviction of his killer, Derek Chauvin, all happened within this last year, it is proper to begin any discussion of then-Chicago Mayor Emanuel with his alleged cover-up of the police murder of Laquan McDonald.
McDonald, a Black teenager, was shot 16 times and killed by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014. The shooting was initially ruled justifiable. Thirteen months later, after a court order mandated the release of Van Dyke’s dashboard camera, the footage showed McDonald walking away from Van Dyke when he was killed.
Van Dyke was arrested that same day and charged with first-degree murder. He was eventually convicted of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, and sentenced to almost seven years in prison. Three other officers were accused of conspiracy and obstruction of justice for trying to cover up the shooting, but all three were acquitted in a bench trial in January 2019.
Mayor Emanuel, in the middle of a tight reelection campaign when McDonald was murdered, was accused of burying the dashboard video for 13 months in order to improve his reelection chances. A deeply questionable $5 million payment to the McDonald family by the city council, and the firing of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, augmented those accusations. Calls rose for Emanuel to resign, but he refused.
“Van Dyke shot McDonald on October 20, 2014 — almost six months before the general election,” wrote Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky in November of 2015. “By February, word had already emerged about the tape of the shooting. As impossible as this sounds, just imagine Mayor Emanuel had released the video in, say, November — without being forced to by a lawsuit. Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez probably would’ve quickly responded with an indictment — just like she did earlier this week, when the tape actually was released. I mean, it’s really hard to look at that tape and not call for an indictment. If the mayor had done that, he wouldn’t be the villain in this sordid story. He’d be the hero. Or at least the guy who finally, for once in his life, did the right thing…. But of course, he didn’t do the right thing. He buried the video. He allowed officials to mislead the public.”
Biden is presiding over a nation that has borne witness to the relentless police murders of Black people, which have fueled mass uprisings over the past year, and still thinks a man with the stains Emanuel bears is a proper choice for any post, much less an ambassadorship of such vital strategic and diplomatic importance.
For that reason alone, this is a disgraceful appointment on the part of the president, and one that must be reversed. Because it is Emanuel we’re talking about, of course it is not the only reason. The litany of hubris-driven failures Emanuel saddled the city of Chicago with before finally leaving office in abject disgrace is the stuff of Greek tragedy.
In every sense, Emanuel pathetically sought to fashion himself as a “boss” in the bullying, old-school Chicago style of the first Mayor Daley. In the end, he proved to be nothing more than a hack with a knack for powerful friends and the instincts to survive his own bottomless derelictions.
“If Biden is being honest about his plans to be an American president who brings people together, the post-Rahm state of Chicago should be all the proof the president-elect needs to know that Emanuel isn’t the guy for any job,” wrote Patch columnist Mark Konkol in November of 2020. “America deserves better leaders than a failed mayor whose top City Hall lawyer brokered a deal with a poor mother — $5 million to keep secret a video showing a Chicago cop fire every bullet in his gun, 16 shots, until her Black teenage son was dead — that saved his re-election bid. Take it from a city that knows.”
What is it about Emanuel that causes him to leave smashed little pieces of good things in his wake wherever he goes? The answer lies in his core political beliefs, which can be described as an amalgam of every bad right-swinging idea the Democratic Party came up with in the wilderness of the 1990s. Emanuel is every inch the Clintonian Third-Way Democrat; thus, his knack for taking bad Republican ideas and making them worse. In this time of reckoning, when the party has looked back on that era and deemed it mostly a failure, Emanuel clings to the shreds of that ideology like an overboard yacht owner whose boat was devoured by termites and sank out from under him.
A short list of his notable positions over the years includes his staunch support for the Iraq War in 2003, which puts him in company with the president. He has been dogged in his pursuit of a war with Iran and passionate about increasing defense spending whenever the opportunity arises. He is a stalwart supporter of Israel, having served as a civilian volunteer for Israel’s army in the early 1990s. Emanuel has lent vocal support to Israel’s assassination policies as well as its military actions, such as the 2006 attacks on Lebanon that were denounced by Amnesty International.
And Biden is sending this person to be our ambassador to Japan. This appointment puts Emanuel front and center to one of the most perilous diplomatic and military situations on Earth: the U.S.’s so-called “pivot” of power and influence toward Asia, and China’s potential response to such moves. America’s “Man in Japan” will play a key role in whatever comes next, and Emanuel’s thoroughgoing hawk bona fides make him a genuinely belligerent choice for the post.
“The Biden administration is busy trying to make good on the long-delayed pivot to Asia by putting more military assets in the Western Pacific,” reported Foreign Policy last month, “but it is still trying to figure out how to manage Beijing’s growing axis with Moscow, which a 2019 U.S. intelligence assessment described as more aligned than at any point in the past 60 years. Chinese President Xi Jinping once described Russian President Vladimir Putin as his ‘best friend and colleague.’”
Rahm Emanuel, like the cat, is back. The nation is diminished for it, and maybe in actual danger because of it. The man does like a good war, after all. From Japan, maybe he can cheerlead for one. Again.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This Ramadan has been a difficult one for many Muslims. In the U.S., police have continued to murder Black people, interpersonal violence has targeted trans women of color and Asian women, and a rash of legislation has targeted trans youth and Black voters and protesters. Israeli violence against Palestinian people in Sheikh Jarrah, Al-Aqsa Mosque and Gaza has escalated. In India, COVID-19 deaths have surged.
It is a moment that calls us to organize toward abolition — the dismantling of systems that incarcerate, surveil, police and punish, and the creation of systems that meet people’s needs and support accountability and change — more than ever.
Now, as Muslims around the world celebrate Eid ul’Fitr and mark the end of the Ramadan, many of us are also reflecting on our collective efforts to help others. During this time of reflection and celebration, I am excited to lift up the efforts that Muslims in queer and trans communities are engaged in to create a just world free of police, prisons and punishment.
One doesn’t need to look far to see the commitment to abolition among some U.S.-based queer and trans Muslim organizations and leaders. Masjid al-Rabia, a mosque and Islamic community center in Chicago, mobilized volunteers to send care packages to incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims this Ramadan.
The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), a national LGBTQ+ Muslim organization, raised over $2,500 for Believers Bailout (a fund that posts bail or bond for incarcerated Muslims). MASGD also encouraged people to support campaigns to free Ashley Diamond (an incarcerated Black trans woman) and Karim Golding (an incarcerated Black Muslim immigrant).
The Queer Muslim Book Club, a New York City-based organization, held a weekly abolitionist reading group, inspired by reading groups that Believers Bailout has held.
I got curious about what I see as a pattern of queer and trans abolitionist work during Ramadan, so I reached out to others to learn more. I spoke with Muslims connected to queer and trans communities about how and why they do abolitionist work during Ramadan.
Not everyone agreed with me about a pattern — one pointed out that many queer and trans Muslims have not yet arrived at an abolitionist outlook, and several explained that their abolitionist efforts during Ramadan are simply a continuation of what they do every month of the year. But what did emerge was a holistic vision of abolition that unifies the personal, political and spiritual.
Abolitionist Action
This Ramadan, Mirna Haidar visited their cousin in prison in Lebanon. Mirna, who lives in New York and serves on the MASGD steering committee, goes back to Lebanon to visit family when she can. But they had never met this cousin before. He has been incarcerated for 25 years, most of Mirna’s life, and it has been hard for the family to maintain contact. “It was just too jarring to see him behind those bars, and see the condition he was in… I offered what support I could,” Mirna said. Other family members also felt moved to reconnect with him this Ramadan, and Mirna is compiling family contact information to send to him.
Visiting a family member in prison may not be what everyone imagines abolitionist work to look like. But Mirna explains that meeting people’s immediate needs — acknowledging and supporting their humanity — is part of an abolitionist approach. “Until abolition, insh’allah, we cannot be selfish with our asks,” she said. “There are people who are currently incarcerated who want halal iftar meals. Those things matter. Being in touch with incarcerated folks and demanding things for them — that is not reform. That is abolition.”
Like Mirna, Malik Johnson, who works with incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims, named relationships with others as a central to abolition. “For me, abolition is in the fabric of our lives,” he said. “So, it’s not something that you do or that you have to try to get. Meeting kindness with kindness, meeting even adversity with kindness — for me, that’s abolition.”
When I asked Johnson about common requests of incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims, he reflected that they were often quite simple — a prayer rug, a Quran — but not always easy to realize. Many want someone “to communicate with on a long-term basis…. What they’re requesting really is a best friend.”
Organizers of a queer Muslim abolitionist Ramadan reading group developed and worked through a syllabus on Islamic, queer and feminist approaches to conflict and harm; the impact of policing and incarceration on Muslims; and other abolition-related topics. “For me personally, abolition is also about examining how I navigate the world and engage with harm that I witness, endure and cause, and how to navigate the aftermath of harm in a way that centers healing, growth and accountability,” Firza*, one of the organizers, said. “It has been so helpful to do this syllabus with others, especially with folks with varying life experiences and relationships to abolition and prisons.”
Serena W. Lin, another organizer of the reading group, agrees. “People don’t know how to imagine a world without incarceration,” Lin wrote, suggesting that different ways of thinking related to both Ramadan and COVID-19 might help.
Muslim Justice League hosted an Abolition at the Iftar Table event this Ramadan. Jordan Jamil Ahmed, community organizer of the Muslim Justice League, pointed out that even when organizations and events are not explicitly queer- and trans-led, “many of us working behind the scenes … are a part of the queer community and are invested in abolitionist values.” Malek Ansari*, who attended the event, said it was “wonderful,” and helpful in thinking about how to have “intentional conversations with loved ones about abolition.”
Masjid al-Rabia, MASGD and Muslim Justice League have also been collaborating with a fourth organization, Reconstructed, to build community and work toward abolition this Ramadan. Reconstructed, a creative magazine and conversation space for all Muslims, is well-positioned to do this work since, as the organization points out, “abolition is inherently creative and imaginative work.”
But queer and trans Muslims are also organizing for abolition in many other ways, all year round. Mirna has worked to stop military recruitment in New York City-area schools. They note that some people seem to think of the military as separate from law enforcement, but “as a war survivor, I don’t see that separation.”
Ansari, lead co-coordinator of MASGD and board executive member of Trans Lifeline, educates people about abolition through the Defund Chicago Police Department campaign, and researches the impact of policing on marginalized Chicagoans.
Throughout the year, Muslim Justice League works to end the Countering Violent Extremism program and defund the police in the Boston area. MASGD has held trainings on legal rights and first aid for protests, and Masjid al-Rabia has held events connecting incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims with pen pals and facilitated support groups for Muslims recovering from or exploring harm reduction related to substance use. Reconstructed amplifies the creative work or currently and formerly incarcerated people, as well as those targeted by police.
Abolitionist Vision
When I asked people about why they supported abolition, many had answers rooted in their faith. Ansari said, “To me, abolitionist work is a form of worship and following the principles of Islam, a religion that was founded on questioning existing systems that haven’t served us.”
Johnson commented on the prophetic example of Jesus responding to harm. Mirna, who defines abolition as “accountability without incarceration,” discussed the importance of recovering histories of how Muslim communities responded to conflict and harm prior to colonization. She added, “Since I was a kid, Ramadan was all about thinking about others, and being inclusive of people who cannot join you at the iftar table.” Reconstructed shared the following saying of Muhammad (may peace be upon him), which they note is an “anchoring sentiment” for their work: “Feed the hungry, visit the sick, and set free the captives.”
The lived experience of being a queer or trans Muslim deeply informs people’s commitment to abolition. Ansari grew up as queer nonbinary Muslim in a community of refugees and immigrants. “Having that perspective has allowed me to see how policing played a central role in enforcing assimilation to survive,” they commented, going on to outline a vision for abolition “where youth are more connected with the older generation, where all of us know how to plant or grow our own food locally, and where work is not a precursor to accessing the resources we need to survive and thrive.”
Firza noted, “Queer and trans Muslims are not a monolithic population, but there is a shared experience that understands the threat (and unfortunately, oftentimes the lived experience) of violence and punishment simply for being who they are…. I am committed to building community that values growth and does not dispose of anyone.”
Ahmed agreed, asking, “How can I seek support and alliance from other folks if I am not also showing up for those who experience even more intolerance or violence or degradation?”
Perhaps all of this is why, as Firza puts it, “Studying prison abolition during Ramadan feels like one of the most Muslim things I’ve ever done during Ramadan.”
Eid Mubarak.
*They asked to use a pseudonym for privacy and safety.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Republicans never need a good excuse, or even a bad one, to stiff working people and the poor. Doing so has been their calling card for generations, their reason to get up in the morning. Less money for workers equals more profits for bosses: So simple that even Louie Gohmert could understand it, and piffle to mucky old morals. As Bob Dylan once said, money doesn’t talk, it swears.
The latest jobs report landed with an unimpressive thud last Friday, and the phenomenon reared its gilded head once again. The report, which detailed a modest hiring boost of 266,000 new jobs, was a surprising disappointment after so much money had been supercharged into the economy by way of stimulus checks and other vital benefits. “However,” reported CNBC, “markets had only a mild reaction to the bad news, a sign that investors expect the Federal Reserve to keep its ultra-easy policies in place and believe that the big miss likely was a short-term phenomenon.”
Republicans who had been giving the big old hairy eyeball to all that stimulus cash flowing to the people, on the other hand, suddenly had new reason to live. Benefit money makes people not want to work! It is stripping the populace of the drive that beats in the heart of all true Americans! This is an enduring racist and classist trope, one that never seems to be applied to the idle children of the ultra-wealthy, but I digress.
By last weekend, the stampede was on. “An unexpected slowdown in hiring nationwide has prompted some Republican governors to start slashing jobless benefits in their states, hoping that the loss of generous federal aid might force more people to try to return to work,” reported The Washington Post. “The new GOP cuts chiefly target the extra $300 in weekly payments that millions of Americans have received for months in addition to their usual unemployment checks…. Republican policymakers have long opposed these heightened unemployment payments and unanimously voted against extending them earlier this year.”
Many Democrats and economists believe this latest jobs report is an aberration, an anomaly that does not represent the economic growth to come. People are still spooked by COVID and not quite ready to charge back to waiting tables at the crowded restaurant or driving a register at a packed retail store. Only half the country has been vaccinated, and a significant portion of the other half is going to need convincing before accepting the spike. That vaccination gap is also feeding the employment hesitance of millions.
Lots of folks who have spent the last year in a defensive crouch have also been reconsidering their options over that time. “There is also growing evidence — both anecdotal and in surveys — that a lot of people want to do something different with their lives than they did before the pandemic,” reports the Post. “The coronavirus outbreak has had a dramatic psychological effect on workers, and people are reassessing what they want to do and how they want to work, whether in an office, at home or some hybrid combination.”
Unfortunately, one of those who appears to be listening to hollow Republican economic platitudes in this matter is the president himself, who is no stranger to the lure of right-leaning neoliberal thinking when it comes to financial matters. “We’re going to make it clear that anyone collecting unemployment, who was offered a suitable job, must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits,” Biden said on Monday. “We don’t see much evidence of that.”
Mitch McConnell may as well have said this. Imagine for a moment you’re a 22-year-old restaurant worker who has been unemployed and homebound since March 2020. All that has kept you afloat have been those stimulus checks and the enhanced unemployment benefits that are now under attack. Now that things are opening up, the only job you can get at the moment is at your old place, where the owner can fire you if you looked at them wrong, where the manager and customers sexually harassed you as part “restaurant culture,” and where COVID precautions barely exist.
You’d rather drink paint that go back to that job, where conditions started out bad and deteriorated over the past year. However, if you don’t, no lesser light than the president says you could lose half your absolutely needed unemployment benefits, just because you think you deserve better. After all, that old job is perfectly “suitable.” Biden has shown that he is able to be moved on policy. In this, one hopes a trusted adviser gets in his ear with a megaphone and a tall glass of basic humanity.
This tension between bosses and workers, between capitalism and sustainable existence, put many COVID victims in the ground over the last year. This permanent push to “open up” and “get back to normal” was, and remains, nothing less than capitalism demanding that the workers be stuffed back into their roles regardless of the peril. This venomous profit motive stands above all other priorities, and it got a lot of people killed by way of hasty anti-science “re-openings” that rang a dinner bell for the virus.
Now, however, we appear to stand upon a moment when workers may well have the upper hand. Multiple industries, most notably restaurant and retail, are involved in the Chamber of Commerce’s stampede to cut unemployment benefits and speed workers back into the workplace.
What if those workers didn’t go?
What if those millions of workers who have had a year to think about it believe they deserve better?
What would the average retail or restaurant worker like to see change? Nothing that would crack the mantle of the Earth, to be sure. Hannah B. from New Mexico, a retail and restaurant worker for going on two decades, compiled for me a short list of expectations:
– Pay workers properly. No more restaurant jobs paying $2 an hour plus tips or retail jobs that pay nowhere near a living wage.
– Provide paid sick time. (Workers often have to come to work with the flu, bronchitis, colds or strep, or risk losing their job.)
– Provide a set schedule with two days off in a row…. Retail and restaurant worker schedules change radically from week to week, making it virtually impossible to plan a coherent family existence.
– Make it possible to get a raise. There’s no incentive to work somewhere if this isn’t on the table.
– Follow the OSHA requirements for safety for COVID. Follow OSHA guidelines, period.
– Protect employees from mistreatment by customers and other staff.
Check those boxes, and there will be a stampede of workers flooding the current job openings. Most everyone wants to work, despite the belittling racist philosophy of Republican corporatism. After this past year, many people want that work to be more than a dreary ordeal of basic survival at an utterly unsustainable wage. We can do that.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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While rewatching the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night Batman series this weekend, a moment jumped out with palpable familiarity. A well-armed junta under the command of arch-fiend Bane had taken control of the city of Gotham, setting up kangaroo courts where everyone is guilty the moment they set foot in the room. Even some of the bad guys find themselves facing judgment, with one sputtering, “But… but I’m one of you!”
Only two sentences were available in this court: death or exile. Death was straightforward. Exile involved being forced to cross the thin river ice that surrounded the winter-bound city. None survived exile; the ice devoured all comers. When Police Commissioner Jim Gordon is presented before this court, he defiantly chooses death rather than face the elongated humiliation of the river. The judge was nonplussed. “Death,” he pronounced as he brought down the gavel, “by exile.”
The parallel was instantly evident: Rep. Liz Cheney! A once-prominent member of the junta formerly known as the Republican Party, which is now controlled by a cult leader with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance against whomever and whatever presents itself, Cheney has found herself on the far side of those who once championed her squalid family name.
Her father, one of the more obvious war criminals in U.S. history and a force for decades within the party, has been equally excommunicated from the hearth of the faithful. Former Vice President Dick Cheney no longer holds elected office, however, while his daughter is currently the third-ranking GOP official in the House.
For now.
“The top Republican in the House on Sunday publicly endorsed the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from the party’s leadership team,” reports The Washington Post, “paving the way for Cheney’s removal as early as this week and sending a clear message that allegiance to former president Donald Trump is a requirement to hold power in the GOP. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threw his support behind Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) to become the new Republican conference chair, the No. 3 job in GOP leadership.”
Why? What would motivate the GOP to immolate the political career of one of its more prominent up-and-comers? Cheney has faithfully adhered to the ghastly codex of modern Republican morality with grim enthusiasm over the years, but in the age of Trump, the only loyalty that matters is your loyalty to him.
Because Cheney voted to impeach Trump after he incited his supporters to sack the Capitol, and because she refuses to peddle the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, Trump has commanded she tread the ice. She is not the only one who has aroused his ire, but at present, she is the entrée in this festival of retribution.
If the reporting holds, Cheney’s moment of “death or exile” is coming on Wednesday, when the House returns to session. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the more astonishing lickspittles in the annals of this age, is using Cheney as a meat shield to protect himself from the fact that he also denounced Trump after January 6, though he did not vote to impeach. That fact may be the only reason he still has a job.
Imagine living every day in fear that Trump might remember something about you, or be reminded of something about you by some aide with an ax to grind or a friend to promote. That’s McCarthy’s whole existence today, and it is altogether pathetic.
McCarthy hopes he will become speaker if the GOP retakes the House in ’22, but 40 miles of bad road lie between this moment and that outcome. “Some advisers are urging Donald Trump not to support McCarthy for Speaker if Republicans flip control of the House next year,” reports Politico. “Trump, who has been angry McCarthy helped defend Cheney’s role as conference chair in late February, is interested by the idea.”
Cheney’s current plight stands as one of the more bizarre transmogrifications in the history of modern politics. For years, she was relentless in her pursuit of the worst elements of Republican “ideology:”
During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat.
Unfortunately, Cheney and her allies won their earlier fight for the soul of the party. During the Obama era, the Republican Party became ever more hostile to the fundamental rights of religious and ethnic minorities, and ultimately chose Donald Trump, a man who attacked those rights as an existential threat to the nation, as its leader.
Cheney’s courageous stand against the party of Trump is a stand against a party she helped build, a monster she helped create. The tragedy is not that she might suffer for her folly, but that American democracy will. Her latter-day epiphany is welcome, but it also comes far too late.
Even Maureen Dowd, The New York Times champion of D.C. insider snark, laid Cheney low in a blistering Saturday column: “Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done.” Boom, thanks for playing, turn out the lights when you leave.
Now that her entire political career is trembling on the verge of extinction, Liz Cheney has recast herself as a sort of Joan of Arc character, a doomed victim of nefarious forces she has vowed to keep fighting. The fact that those forces have “Made By The Cheney Family” stamped on their bootheels is but an accent in the symphony of hypocrisy that is consuming the GOP.
The loss of her position within the party is all but a foregone conclusion. Cheney’s next task will be to see if her district in Wyoming, long a Cheney-GOP stronghold, will vote her out of office entirely next year. By every indication, Trump intends to make retaining her seat as difficult as possible, as he moves to purge the ranks of any and all who dare to offer less than seamless fealty to the scattered, violent nihilism that is now his brand.
“History is watching,” Cheney wrote in a recent opinion piece that still managed to single out “wokeness” as a threat commensurate to Trump. “Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”
History has been watching for a while, Liz, and you are no hero. Train a pack of dogs with violence, ignorance and hunger, and they will turn and tear you to pieces sooner or later. For Cheney, it is sooner, and the ice beckons. Nothing on Earth can compel me to root for a Cheney, but I will be watching to see what she can do to prevent the monstrous party she helped make from eating itself.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Over the weekend, the Virginia Republican Party held its convention at which it was supposed to choose its candidates for the off-year election this fall. The three top candidates for governor have been described as “Trumpy, Trumpier and Trumpiest,” so you can easily see where Virginia Republicans are positioning themselves in the GOP circular firing squad. In their zeal to model their allegiance to their Ultimate Leader, Republicans went out of their way to restrict the voting process to assure “the integrity” of the vote. According to NBC News’ Alex Seitz-Wald it didn’t go very well:
At issue is a decision to quietly allow voters to participate in their complicated primary process even if they left blank parts of the application, including required fields that asked for their state-issued voter ID number and a signature, according to documents and an audio recording of a call obtained exclusively by NBC News. Republicans in the state say the nominating contest has been a logistical nightmare.
Their own activists couldn’t traverse all of the GOP’s newly-imposed “voter integrity” verifications. Evidently, a whole bunch of people didn’t know how to do fill out the necessary paperwork so they left it whole portions blank which, under the new strict vote-counting rules the Republicans are pushing, should result in throwing out the ballot or registration form.
The right-wing gubernatorial candidate who calls herself “Trump in heels,” (and is widely considered the Trumpiest of the lot) Amanda Chase is not standing for it. She wrote this to her supporters:
“DO NOT TRUST THE PARTY TO DELIVER ACCURATE RESULTS. Who should you go to for the proper results? Me and my campaign! My campaign will be monitoring the voting and data entry on election night. If they are accurate, we will tell you. If they are not, I will be prepared to sue in court to force a public count.”
She means it:
Radical right-wing Virginia state senator Amanda Chase says that if she does not emerge from the GOP’s nominating convention today as the Republican candidate for governor, she’ll demand an audit of the vote. pic.twitter.com/xSrxunOnlu
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 8, 2021
They don’t expect the vote to be fully tabulated for some time and since it’s a ranked-choice voting process, there will undoubtedly be a runoff. Is there any doubt that Chase will deny the validity of the vote count if she doesn’t make the runoff? After all, she is the Trumpiest and we know what that means:
He won that year. And we all know what happened when, four years later, he didn’t.
So judging from what’s going on with election laws around the country and the lockstep belief among the faithful, I think it’s fair to assume that we can expect more of it. As you can see from the Virginia example, one problem with these draconian voting restrictions is that they will affect Republican voters the same way they will affect the Democrats. It’s possible they’ll affect them even more since the GOP has been pushing absentee voting for years for their older constituents, the very people who may be most confused by the changes. Perversely, that will provide even more fodder for the losers to contest the election results and further degrade their own voters’ faith in the system. After all, the last election results were certified by Republican officials and Republican judges all over the country, yet Republican voters still believe it was fraudulent. It won’t matter in 2022 and 2024 that it was Republicans who instituted the rules that disadvantage their own voters.
Keep in mind that the new voting restrictions are not where this ends.
Republicans are also doing their usual tricks of “purging” voters from the rolls and “caging.” But there are some newer very troubling moves, starting with the new expansive rules in 20 states for “poll watchers” which basically means that fanatical Republican extremists will be free to harass and intimidate voters as they are trying to cast a vote. This technique is thought to be more effective in precincts with more minority voters but Republicans may be surprised. Everyone knows what they’re up to now so Democrats are highly unlikely to be intimidated by MAGA loyalists at the ballot box.
Because we are also seeing the entire party from Ted Cruz, R-Tx., and Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga, to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., all buying into the notion that Trump’s Jan. 6th gambit to overturn the election was legitimate, it’s clear that’s become conventional wisdom in the GOP as well. At this point, it appears that they have all decided to treat the insurrection itself as a somewhat overzealous but nonetheless valid response to having had the election “stolen.”
Trump made a serious run at getting the election overturned. He cared nothing for legitimacy, openly and blatantly threatened, cajoled and intimidated state and local elections officials to refuse to certify the results based upon sloppily made-up evidence and conspiracy theories. For months he bellowed that mail-in votes were fraudulent and 6 weeks before the election he stated outright that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett confirmed because he expected the court to decide the election and he needed that extra vote just in case.
As it happened those local officials and judges around the country refused to cooperate. Today those officials are all being purged from the party. All these voter “integrity” bills will eventually be challenged and we’ll see if the courts are still independent or if conservative jurists are now on the Trump train as well. After all, it all seemed like a stunning assault on our tradition of a peaceful transfer of power at the time. Something like this had never happened before. Will they feel the same way if it happens again?
Even more unnerving is the growing perception that all this supposed “rigging” leaves the GOP with no choice but to refuse to vote to certify any more presidential elections if they have the power to do it. There is unfortunately a decent chance that McCarthy might just be the Speaker of the House in 2025 and if Trump is on the ballot, as he probably will be, does anyone believe he would dare defy him again?
pretty clear at this point that if Republicans control Congress in 2024 a Democrat will not be allowed to win the presidential election. simple as that https://t.co/ujMm5ifn3U
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) May 10, 2021
It is almost inevitable that “stop the steal” will be an ongoing GOP rallying cry.
Whatever misgivings the Republican establishment may have had about Donald Trump’s strategy to usurp democracy, they have rapidly come around to being his servile minions once again. With three more years of banging this drum, the Trump cult will be thoroughly convinced that it is literally impossible for them to legitimately lose elections. And GOP officials will be happy to let them believe that as long it means they can stay in power.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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There’s a reason why so many activists have insisted that the Derek Chauvin verdict — though it offers a measure of solace for George Floyd’s family — isn’t justice. Our current way of thinking about and doing justice does not and cannot meet the moment. If anything, the Chauvin verdict achingly demonstrates that justice as we know it is wanting. It’s time to imagine a new justice that does and can.
Rooted in slavery, convict leasing, the chain gang, Jim Crow and continuing into the present with mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline and the criminalization of immigration, our “justice” system itself perpetrates untold harm.
Also, the U.S. way of “justice” can’t meet the moment because it’s designed to address only individual harm — and ineffectively and inequitably at that. Today, most of us recognize that the nation’s policing problem isn’t just individual; it’s systemic. Thus, true justice isn’t about successful prosecution of officers. It’s about reckoning with and disrupting entire histories, legacies, and systems of racial terror and white supremacy that, like monsters who we think are dead but keep coming back, relentlessly replicate and reproduce themselves.
Plus, our criminal legal system looks backward to blame, judge and punish people for past harm only. What about stopping future harm? Also, in accusing, adjudicating and sentencing, our system simply responds to the original harm with another. What about repair? And what about healing?
Justice as we know it can’t stop the killings. This was heartbreakingly plain to see with three police-perpetrated killings occurring during the three-week Chauvin trial, like a deadly virus gone wild. 13-year-old Adam Toledo killed with empty hands up in Chicago. Michael Hughes in Florida. 20-year-old Daunte Wright shot just miles from the George Floyd trial. And 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant shot six times by Columbus, Ohio, police on the same day the Chauvin verdict came in. Never-ending grief.
Even if every murderous officer were successfully prosecuted, it wouldn’t stop the killings.
True justice means a holistic justice that recognizes harm, takes responsibility for harm, repairs harm and prevents recurrence. A forward-looking justice that sets its sights on stopping the killings and creating new futures where Black and people of color lives matter. An inclusive accountability process led by those most negatively impacted and pursued by radically respectful, democratic, and relational means. One that challenges systems of domination that live outside of us as well as those that live inside of us. Restorative justice-informed truth processes rooted in anti-racial capitalist, anti-heteropatriarchal values and in indigenous wisdoms about humanity, collectivity, responsibility and the earth are our North Star.
Of the extraordinary numbers of justice initiatives bubbling up today throughout the nation, most instantiate one or some of the four elements of restorative justice accountability. But I see none that embody all: (1) recognizing harm — truth-telling (2) taking responsibility for harm — public apologies and acknowledgments (3) making reparations proportional to the harm — restitution, reparations funds, memorialization initiatives to honor victims and (4) preventing recurrence — narrative change, public re-education, releasing white supremacist systems and reimagining them. Neither do any intentionally create a values-driven accountability process that is radically respectful, democratic and relational, and that centers the voices of those negatively impacted by harm. Even so, when looking at the whole of the innumerable initiatives coming forth today, we can make out the outlines of an emergent justice glimmering on the horizon.
It’s Georgetown’s $100 million reparations funds for descendants of enslaved persons sold to keep the university afloat that tell the story. It’s Brown’s truth-telling about its complicity with slavery, its acts of repair including a reparations fund and establishment of a Center for the Study of Slavery. It’s Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and University of Virginia’s truth-telling, memorialization, renaming and reparations initiatives spurred by student activism. It’s the totality of these and similar efforts of an estimated 75 additional higher educational institutions (all of whom are members of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium) that tell the story of a new justice dawning.
It’s Apple’s $100 million equity reparations fund to establish learning hubs at historical Black colleges and universities, an academy in Detroit to support coding and tech education, and a venture capital fund to support Black and Brown entrepreneurs that prefigures a new justice.
It’s the reparations funds, commissions, and related initiatives springing up in Evanston, Burlington, Asheville, and in scores of additional municipalities and in state and federal legislative bodies, particularly House Resolution 40 to study and develop reparations proposals that — after 32 years of languishing in the Judiciary Committee, finally got out of committee recently — presage a new justice. Thanks to the late Rep. John Conyers who introduced the bill in 1989 and to time-honored legacy reparations groups the National Coalition for Black Reparations in America and the National African-American Reparations Commissions.
At Northeastern Law University, it’s the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project’s work to unearth and seek public apologies and reparations and memorialization for cold cases of lynchings implicating law enforcement in the civil rights era.
It’s the removal of more than 110 confederate statues and the erection of memorials in numerous localities, like Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to honor lynching victims and its Legacy Museum to honor enslaved persons. It’s the Black Lives Matter street renamings in more than 30 cities.
It’s the numerous educational institutions like Amherst, that pressed by student organizing, are publicly apologizing to students for implicit bias, harassment, stereotyping, invisiblizing, hypervisiblizing, underrepresenting and other inequities and are additionally engaging in re-imagining strategies to become anti-racist institutions. It’s the many additional public and private entities engaged in similar anti-racist transformative initiatives.
It’s the more than 20 major cities that are defunding police and transferring money to community agencies that are better equipped to respond to calls involving homeless or disabled persons and those struggling with drug addiction. It’s similarly the 26 major cities taking police out of schools and replacing them with counselors, restorative justice facilitators and peace ambassadors like here in my hometown of Oakland that foreshadow the emergent justice.
In the arts, it’s the We See You White American Theater anti-racist transformative initiative, the Reclamation Project at the Kennedy Center and other strategies to repair historical harm and imagine a path forward in theater arts that portend the new justice.
Unprecedented numbers of transitional justice and truth and reconciliation-type initiatives in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Iowa, Maryland and additional municipalities in the nation also augur a justice re-imagined.
The fullness of these complex, diverse, variegated, decentralized and self-organizing developments offer clues about what a re-imagined justice might look like.
Let’s awaken to the moment. Let’s actively support and nurture the truth, reparations, memorialization and re-imagining initiatives coming forth all over the country, the lion’s share since George Floyd was crushed to death by Derek Chauvin. Help them land on all four restorative justice accountability touchstones. Help ensure these processes are respectful, inclusive, relational, non-hierarchical, collaborative, and community-driven rather than top-down and systems-dominated. Assist in the birthing of a new justice for the nation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Like many Muslims, I remember feeling excited as a child each year when Ramadan came around. Though I didn’t entirely understand the purpose of fasting, I was proud of being Muslim and was eager to emulate my parents. Since I began fasting in second grade, Ramadan has been a core part of my practice of Islam.
While there is great diversity among Muslims around the globe, the holy month of Ramadan has the power of uniting the entire Ummah (the Arabic word for Muslim community) in a collective observance of fasting and prayer each year. It is this solidarity in worship of Allah that is so evocative of the hadith — the traditions and sayings by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), in which he said: “The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When any part of the body suffers, the rest of the body comes to its defense.”
In the current climate of globe-spanning Islamophobia and Muslim suffering, however, acting as one body has become difficult if not impossible. The omnipresent lens of national security subjects our entire faith community to state surveillance, harassment and dehumanizing discourse in media, making it even more difficult for Muslims to reach across existing barriers of race, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic differences.
A recent Vox article titled “9 questions about the Muslim holy month you were too embarrassed to ask” offered answers to questions about the meaning of Ramadan, how Muslims fast and how to be supportive of a friend who is fasting. The final question, however, was, “So if you’re not supposed to get angry or complain or gossip during Ramadan, how come terrorist attacks by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda always seem to spike during Ramadan?” The Vox author’s tongue-in-cheek response was “because terrorists are assholes.”
The structure of that Vox article seemed aimed at implying that the final question about terrorism followed logically from the others, but in reality, it had no legitimate place in that article. Whereas the preceding questions convey legitimate information about Ramadan, the last question served only to reproduce the constant cultural fixation on the supposed connection between Islam and terrorism.
The Vox article was by no means alone in suggesting a connection between Ramadan and an increase in terrorist attacks — a Google search with the question “does terrorism increase during Ramadan” yields many results. Although empirical claims about this increase in terrorist activity abound, the possibility that something other than Ramadan might account for it is conspicuously absent from any of the responses. The question is consistently posed without any context or alternative hypotheses — leaving Ramadan as the sole explanation for any violence.
An article in The Atlantic titled “Is ISIS More Violent During Ramadan?” is paradigmatic. In seeking answers, this article refers to a 2015 University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) report which examined data on over a decade of attacks by ISIS and other prior existing terrorist groups. This report concluded that “while major attacks have taken place during Ramadan, we have also observed major attacks outside the month of Ramadan, and periods during which Ramadan was relatively calm. Thus, it remains an open question whether Ramadan is a period of heightened risk.” But one unanswered question remains: What was the impetus was for assuming a connection between Ramadan and violence in the first place, other than Islamophobic tropes about Muslims as inherently violent?
An academic article titled “Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence” explores this question from a wider perspective. According to the authors, “The Islamic calendar provides an opportunity to illuminate the impact of religious practices on violence because the calendar regulates the timing of society-wide observance and because the religious meaning of specific days changes predictably and annually, creating sufficient variation to assess its effect.” While the authors make what sounds like a rational argument, the argument assumes that the Islamic calendar, in the final analysis, will have the most determining impact on any instances of violence that take place during Ramadan.
This study ultimately concludes that rather than fostering violence, the Islamic calendar is a force for restraining it. This is because, the authors reason, potential perpetrators rely on societal support and judgements about the appropriateness of committing acts of violence during or on significant Muslim holidays. In this case, the authors reach a seemingly positive conclusion, using empirical data to support findings that provide a strong rebuttal to the assumed link between Ramadan and terrorism. However, the research question assumes in the first place that there is an impulse or will to violence within Muslim communities that the Islamic calendar is somehow regulating.
The persistence of the debate around whether the holy month of Ramadan is a motivator for violence highlights a phenomenon that has been omnipresent in the “war on terror” — the framing of Islam as a national security threat, which then serves as justification for extreme interventions by the state.
With Islam securitized, its followers, and its practices are seen first and foremost as potential security threats. This imposition of the lens of national security over the actions of Muslims and Muslim communities includes what amounts to an invasion of the private space that is formed by community religious observance. Empirical validity or not aside, the pervasive scrutiny that these spaces are subject to puts practitioners of Islam in the impossible position of having to defend and justify their religion rather than simply practice it. The unifying power of Ramadan should lie in solidarity of belief that transcends difference, not in a common posture of defensiveness that has been imposed on the religion and its adherents from outside.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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These last weeks, months, years and decades we keep on adding names to the list — Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, Ronald Johnson, Pierre Loury, Rekia Boyd, Nickolas Lee, Laquan McDonald, Archie Lee Chambers, Maurice Granton, Anthony Alvarez.… The list of victims of police murder seems never-ending. Then there is the list of police torture survivors — Gerald Reed, Stanley Howard, Tony Anderson, Darrell Fair, Sean Tyler, Kilroy Watkins, and on and on and on. Many of us speak these names. We show up at the rallies and actions demanding justice. We work tirelessly to dismantle the long-serving systems and structures that brutalize and kill Black and Brown bodies. We feel the anger and the terror. But, we don’t often acknowledge that behind every name, every video, every individual locked up in the United States, every police stop, immense and complex trauma is left behind.
Our language is limited in its ability to name the multiple consequences of the particular compounded trauma wreaked by and left behind at the hands of the state — directly and indirectly. This absence of language is a result of the invisibility and denial that our systems rely upon to continue to enact oppression. Language is essential for helping us to examine, analyze, identify, reflect and act. We currently exist very much in a pre-language reality, where there is little acknowledgement of the harm, trauma and death that is caused by the state organization of police and mass incarceration. This lack of official language to name that trauma, of course, serves a specific agenda. If you cannot name a thing, it is harder to mobilize against and around it, it is harder to uproot it, and it is very easy to deny it exists at all, let alone address its human and societal impact except for the brief moments of extreme violence that force a disruption of the dominant narrative by providing a momentary glimpse into the normal operations of the violence of the state.
At the Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC), we work with survivors of police violence, police torture and police murder every day. We also know that it is not only incidents of violence that leave a scar. Even those who haven’t been victims of direct violence are experiencing complex trauma — the trauma of a lifetime of knowing that every time you lay your head down at night, or walk to the bus stop, or drive down the street, your chances of being targeted, assaulted or even murdered at the hands of the police are disproportionately higher if you are Black, if you are Brown.
In Chicago, this means that Black people are 22 times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts, and Latinx people are six times more likely. If you are a Chicago police torture survivor, or a family member of a loved one killed by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), or if you are trans, or homeless or disabled, these statistics are compounded. This means that there are significant portions of the population of the city that are living in constant awareness of the deadly potential every single law enforcement agent carries with them. In a city that has one of the largest police forces per capita among big cities in the United States, the instances of running into police are higher than most places in the country.
For over 70 percent of Chicago’s residents who are Black and Brown, this police presence comes at a high cost. In addition to the lives lost and constant threat of danger, there is a trail of trauma leading to increased states of hypervigilance, unsafety and helplessness. This lived reality for many Black and Brown individuals overwhelms the nervous system, and forces individuals and communities to develop survival strategies and coping mechanisms that seek to mitigate the reality of living with a perpetual threat to life and well-being.
These conditions add to the reasons why communities that are surveilled and occupied by policing are also always the poorest and have disproportionate rates of health disparities related to stress. This ongoing stress is state regulated and maintained. Oppression, as defined by Prentis Hemphill, is how society organizes itself to control and distribute trauma. This definition helps us better understand the political nature of health, wellness and trauma, and underscores the important questions of: Who does it serve when we are unwell? Who necessitates and perpetuates our unwellness and our unhealth, and why?
The violence — direct and indirect — of racialized policing is both traumatic and trauma-producing. For many, this means that since the point of birth, the outside world has represented a perpetual environment of violence and harm, with government agents being the largest perpetrators and managers of this violence. Danger — and threat to life — is embodied by police, reinforced by politicians who give cover and legitimacy to policing, and enforced through the courts. This can mean then, for some, safety has never been experienced outside of loved ones, family and immediate community.
Violence at the hands of police is trauma-producing. Seeing police officer after police officer completely escape any consequence and be able to kill and harm with impunity is trauma-producing.
Seeing a court system that allows officers with patterns and practices of abuse and court-verified torture to testify and have their word valued more than those who lived the harm, which is the current reality specifically relevant to CPD torture survivors, is trauma-producing.
Witnessing the ongoing existence of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the union representing police officers, which continues to justify police-perpetrated torture and murder, is trauma-producing. In Chicago, FOP leadership alone represents more than at least 142 disciplinary allegations, yet the mayor continues to engage with and pander to the union. Witnessing that pandering is trauma-producing, too.
What do we know about systemic trauma, defined by CTJC as repeated, ongoing violation, exploitation, and/or deprivation of groups of people? We know that it overwhelms and breaks down our senses of safety and connection, and leaves us on hyperalert. We know that being in a constant state of hypervigilance can rob us of a feeling of having autonomy or control of our self and our bodies. This tension gets stuck and wreaks havoc — emotional, spiritual, social and physical — if it is not tended to and if we don’t invest attention and resources in mitigating its impact. Increases in blood pressure, sleep disturbances, ability to engage in intimate relationships, and more are just some of the consequences of chronic hypervigilance and persistent and complex trauma. All of these conditions tend to be depoliticized in the dominant narrative — somehow, Black and Brown communities are simply more impacted by “predispositional health factors.” In fact, they are consequences of focused deliberately imposed trauma by the state.
At CTJC, we recognize that addressing trauma is not a one-on-one experience that can only happen in a therapist’s office. It is about helping to find new ways to generate safety (internal and external) and to increase our self-determination — our ability to name for ourselves what we need and care about. When our systems are under perpetual siege, when we are not able to experience senses of safety, our bodies, which are experts at survival, know how to shut down or numb out as part of our trauma responses.
Our work is to enable self-determined processes of reintegration back into the body, as we learn how to generate safety for ourselves and our communities. We understand that “healing” is also a political project that includes ending the systems that necessitate and create violence. These individual, community and systemic processes occur together and at times simultaneously.
This last year has seen our communities take massive steps towards collective healing as they rose up to unapologetically name what they needed to feel and be safe. They have stepped into their truth and power to demand not only the defunding of CPD, but also the types of services and investments that will make a difference in their lives and communities. They have collectively moved to heal deep generational wounds of oppression. However, they have been met with police in riot gear and with a refusal by our city government to shift funding away from the police. We have seen 65 percent of unrestricted CARES Act money going to CPD as instructed by our mayor (of the $1.2 billion in CARES Act funds allotted to Chicago, and of the $470 million for personnel costs, $281 million went to the CPD), while the community’s demands for vital support services are rejected.
Our communities are trying to heal, and our city and its systems and structures are not listening — and more often than not, acting in ways opposite to what the community is saying they need. That is trauma-producing.
This is all playing out in Chicago at a time when the country has been forced to face the multiple violent realities of policing and the myriad ways in which government bodies collaborate to protect police, deny survivors and families truths, and perform superficial platitudinal commitments of change — all while police continue to murder. As an example, during Derek Chauvin’s trial, an average of three people a day were killed by police nationwide. As the verdict was being prepared to be aired, Columbus, Ohio, police shot and killed a 16-year-old child, Ma’Khia Bryant, after she called them for help.
The violence we are marching against is not only the physical violence you can watch on video after video of CPD, but the structural violence of decision after decision our city is making to compound trauma, invest in carceral strategies rather than life-affirming ones, and to prioritize and protect the systems and institutions that perpetrate so much harm on our communities. That structural violence also kills and is further trauma-producing. One of the leaders of Justice for Families, Arewa Karen Winters, the great aunty of Pierre Loury who was killed by CPD officer Sean Hitz in 2016, redefines PTSD to stand for present traumatic stress disorder because, as she observes correctly, trauma is ongoing.
The people of Chicago are telling us what they need to feel safe. They are telling us what they need to take care of each other. They are telling us what they need to heal. We need to listen to them.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Let us be clear from the outset: what is happening in India right now is mass murder. And it is organized by a man who has practice in such matters.
Two images bookend the current crisis and contain in them a trajectory of the crisis. The first is the image of the Indian police hosing down migrant workers with bleach last spring, during the first wave of the pandemic, and the grimmer, more recent one of cremation fires burning all over the country. The road between the 2 markers was expected, but the violence lies in the fact that it could have been avoided.
When the infection rate fell after the first lockdown, the Modi regime declared victory over the virus. Lacing his propaganda with Hindu mythology, in March the prime minister told the nation that while the Mahabharat [mythic battle of Hindu epics] war had been won in 18 days, he would win the corona battle in 21.
Policy was shaped around these wild superstitions. The government’s coronavirus task force stopped meeting and the Health Minister declared that India was “in the endgame of the pandemic.” The government boasted that it had sold 55 million doses of vaccine to 62 different countries.
It was an example of a perfect marriage between Hindutva and capitalism. Hindutva assured the government that the virus was over, while capitalist greed monetized a global pandemic.
Vaccine Capitalism
The lifesaving vaccine is available for free in almost all countries of the global North, in India it is not. The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker, is currently the chief manufacturer of the vaccine in the country. In January they sold the first 100 million doses of the vaccine to the Indian government at a “special price” of 200 rupees ($2.74) per dose, after which they raised the price. On the private market the vaccine is being sold for 1,000 rupees ($13.68) per dose.
SII is a private company headed by one of the richest men on the planet, Cyrus Poonawala whose net worth is about $13 billion. Poonawala made his fortune as a horse breeder and racer. These superior gambling instincts guided his son, Adar Poonawala, to look at a devastating global pandemic last year and decide that it was his moment to make a killing. In his interview with international media, Poonawala emphasized that he was going to “take the risk and become a front-runner.”
The usual suspects jumped on this bandwagon of turning public health emergencies into private profit. The Melinda and Bill Gates foundation invested $150 million, while the vampiric firms of Goldman Sachs, Citi and Avendus Capital became SII’s chief advisors. Like all elites from the global south trained well in neoliberal speak, Poonawalla declared his lofty anticolonial goal to be the supply of “A majority of the vaccine, at least initially… to our countrymen before it goes abroad.”
In reality, nearly 80 percent of SII’s went abroad for a steep profit, till the Indian government finally forced a ban on exports as the death count began to rise.
The lineaments of this capitalist macabre soon revealed themselves. Cyrus Poonawalla’s wealth rose 85% in 5 months. And as the smoke from funeral pyres began to darken Indian skies, in late March, Adar Poonawalla signed a deal to rent a London mansion for a record $70,000 a week.
Neoliberal Death-Making
The Modi regime is directly responsible for the current bloodshed. But the road here was paved by all who came before them, those who, since the 1980s, eagerly complied with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and destroyed India’s life-making institutions and infrastructure. We apparently needed more cars, more dams, at the expense of food and healthcare.
The Indian economy was formally liberalized in 1991 under a Congress government. The story that followed will be distressingly familiar.
Reducing the fiscal deficit, the holy grail of neoliberalism, in reality opened up “a revenue deficit,” as the rich were relieved of taxation and the state, while increasing military expenditure, slashed public sector investment and social spending. I want to emphasize that not just the Congress or the BJP but every ruling coalition, at the state and federal level, followed this trajectory, including the Stalinists in power in my home state of West Bengal, whose most celebrated effort was to dispossess peasants from their land in order to build a car factory. More than 50 million Indians were dispossessed to make way for development projects like large dams in the first 50 years of independence to power capitalism’s productivist imperative. Research shows that over 50 percent of the dispossessed were adivasis or indigenous people living in hills and forested land where most of the dams and mines were built.
The healthcare sector told a similar story of predation. According to the BMJ, today, India has just 0.8 doctors and 0.7 hospital beds per 1000 population and is the third largest military spender in the world, after the US and China. But not everyone was left without healthcare. The private healthcare industry exploded under neoliberalism, with the country ranking among the top 20 countries for its private healthcare spending, while being among the lowest for spending on public health.
Austerity, as Ruthie Gilmore teaches us, is the “organized abandonment” of life and life-making paired with “organized violence.” The closing of schools and hospitals and the expansion of prisons and defense budgets hold a mirror to each other.
Austerity, however, merely amplifies what is a key organizing principle of capitalism, the lowering of the value of human life. While capitalism strives to lower the value of labor power in order to increase surplus value, what this means concretely for the working class is, following Rosemary Hennessy’s concept of abjection, what we might call the manufacture of abjection. This mechanism goes beyond the economic effort of lowering wages. Indeed, wages are mostly effectively lowered when capital can successfully lower the parameters of social reproduction of life and labor power. Social oppressions such as race, gender, and caste are some of the key drivers for lowering social reproduction.
We should be reminded of a dark passage in Capital where Marx describes how, during his time in Britain, women were “still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation.” Michael Goldfield recently made a similar point about the role of slavery and racism in the US, showing how “both planters and northern industry benefitted from cheap labor whose lower limit was determined by racism” producing across time “a callous disregard for human dignity and the sanctity of human life.” To paraphrase Gilmore, where life is not precious, life is not precious.
We are seeing this murderous logic of capitalism devaluing life through austerity playing out in India on such a scale that even the rich and powerful are not safe. A former ambassador died while waiting in the parking lot of a Delhi hospital. There are no hospital beds. There are no ambulances. In Surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, the grills used to burn bodies have been operating so relentlessly that the iron on some of them melted. Almost all the mortuary staff in crematoriums and burning ghats are from Dalit or Bahujan communities, whose average monthly pay is around $134. They are working round the clock, without any PPE, providing last rites, grief counselling and consolation to families who in life would have probably advocated for their continued ritual segregation from elite society. Bezwada Wilson, an organizer for the rights and welfare of sanitation workers, told VICE World News, “No one knows how many cremation workers have tested positive for this deadly disease and no one knows how many have died as a result. It is because government officials don’t see the cremation workers and sanitation workers as human.”
But as the country gasps for oxygen, the stock of Linde India, a supplier of medical oxygen, has doubled. Adar Poonawalla has honorably done a Ted Cruz, fled India and sought refuge in his modest London mansion, as have the ultrarich in their private jets.
Meanwhile the rest of India burns, as BJP leaders continue to peddle cow dung and cow urine as medical solutions to covid 19. As of Saturday, only 1.9 percent of India’s population has been fully vaccinated and over 400,000 new daily infections are confirmed by tests, the actual figure is surely far higher.
Capitalist State Against the People
Narendra Modi, more than any Prime Minister since the 1980s, has brutally wielded the might of the Indian state to shape a polity safe for capital, Hindutva has been the ideological battering ram for this project. While absent from any life-making work, such as healthcare or education, the state has been all too present in death-making, from the Gazafication of Kashmir to erecting detention camps for Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. Indeed, it’s not the state that is currently keeping the neoliberalism-ravaged health care system operational, but ordinary people. Teams of volunteers have set up mutual aid networks across the devasted landscape and are trying to reduce harm in ingenious and deeply loving ways. Gurudwaras and mosques are working tirelessly to provide food. The fascist Shiv Sena’s chief Uddhav Thackeray was forced to thank the Muslims of Ichalkaranji town of Maharashtra for donating Zakat money to fund a 10-bed ICU at a local hospital. People have set up COVID helplines to reach the sick and the suffering and are setting up car pools to act as ambulances, while politicians in Maharashtra and Gujarat have been seen hoarding essential drugs and oxygen to sell at a hiked price on the market.
This murderous division of labor between the state and the people needs to be reversed and the state forced to act on their behalf. A number of steps can be taken immediately to stem the tide.
- First, the government needs to invoke the Essential Commodities Act to stop the hoarding of essential drugs, oxygen, and so forth by predatory businesses.
- Second, the state should commandeer spaces to set up field hospitals and open up hotels for the unhoused.
- Third, the government needs to invest money in vaccine production immediately and take steps to make vaccines free and universal. The differential pricing of these drugs, instituted by corporations like SII, needs to be scrapped and vaccines made free for all, and with distribution according to vulnerability, and not wallet size or ability to push to the front.
- Fourth, while Anthony Fauci has recommended a hard lockdown, in a country like India this step is neither humane nor effective without a stimulus payment from the state to families allowing them to be off work. Where there can and should be a hard lockdown is on religious and social gatherings, one of which in recent past, hailed by the government as safe, was undoubtedly been a superspreader.
- Fifth, public funds raised to deal with Covid-19 should be made immediately available in an open and transparent way. During the first wave last year the Modi government set up a Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM-CARES) to deal with the crisis. More than 70% its funds have been donated by public sector units, but PM-CARES is set up to be unaccountable to government audits and hence the public. In reality no one knows how these funds are being spent.
- Finally, the international Left, especially in the global North, has a vital role to play: we need to pressure our own ruling classes to stop hoarding vaccines. Vaccine imperialism may work for the rich countries in the short term, but it allows the virus to mutate in the parts of the globe without the vaccine and eventually return to strike the hoarders. Internationalism in this case is not just a political principle, it is a public health necessity.
My 13-year-old niece and nearly 80-year-old mother in Delhi are terrified to pick up the phone lest they hear of more losses.
I feel the need to marshal more than language to convey the scale of the crisis. How to convey the feel of air saturated with the ashes of cremated bodies? How to translate into words the sound of the wailing mother who just lost her child? But we must use our words, more loudly now than ever. The dead demand that mystical veils of inscrutability be ripped from history, for beneath them lie the banally obvious explanation for this carnage: capitalism.
As we strive towards stabilizing life in India, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we can no longer afford to stabilize the system.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“So shines a good deed in a weary world,” said Willy Wonka when confronted with an unexpected kindness. The candy master may have had similar words about today’s decision by Facebook’s new 20-person “Oversight Board.” For the time being at least, the silence will continue to reign, and a weary world sighs in palpable relief.
“The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7, 2021, to restrict then-President Donald Trump’s access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account,” the board said in a much-anticipated statement this morning.
The decision surprised many, given Facebook’s rightward turn under the influence of Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official who currently runs the social media giant’s powerful Washington, D.C. office. Time and again during the Trump administration, Facebook scrambled like a frog on a hot plate to rewire its rules in a way that made Trump’s gruesomely unacceptable proclamations palatable to the algorithms that run the site. Color me among the surprised; I would have lost a bet on this one.
“Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers,” reports The Washington Post. “And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.”
Ultimately, Trump ran out of running room on January 6 of this year, when he went wild on Facebook as his supporters smashed their way into the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. The ban was handed down the next day.
The board’s decision seemed to include a not-so-subtle scold aimed directly at Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg:
However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension. Facebook’s normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account.
The Board insists that Facebook review this matter to determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform. Facebook must complete its review of this matter within six months of the date of this decision. The Board also made policy recommendations for Facebook to implement in developing clear, necessary, and proportionate policies that promote public safety and respect freedom of expression.
For the Trump camp, at least in the six-month short term, the board’s decision is a bigly expensive deal. Beyond the immediate contact with the public provided by social media platforms, Facebook has been a dual engine for Trump: The spreading of the kind of incendiary propaganda and misinformation that is devoured by his base, combined with a massive fundraising pool.
“And while GOP operatives are gaming out just what it would mean to give back the former president a powerful media bullhorn, the real impact, they say, will be seen in dollar signs,” Politico reported a day before the decision was handed down. “A return to Facebook would open major fundraising spigots that further cement Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, protecting his massive grassroots donor network from potential rivals.”
Perhaps in anticipation of the board’s decision — or maybe just to stick a nyah-nyah-I-don’t-need-you thumb in Facebook’s eye — Trump has launched what he calls a “communications platform” that will be “a place to speak freely and safely.” In fact, it’s just a basic training-wheels blog, and a pretty shabby one at that. Trump is allowed to natter on at any length he wishes; the only way for readers to speak “freely and safely” is by clicking any of the ubiquitous donation buttons. If the thing had come with the ancient AOL login sound, I would not be surprised.
Reaction from the Trump camp was swift. “If you’re surprised by Facebook banning President Trump, you haven’t been paying attention,” whined former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “It’s just the latest page in the book of big tech coming after conservatives. And they won’t stop. Which means it’s past time to hold them accountable. Break them up.”
The Facebook Board’s decision/non-decision adds another layer of complexity to the debate over free speech in the age of social media and the massive corporations that control them. Trump deserved to be banned for his January 6 comments, which cheered on the violent sacking of the Capitol building that resulted in multiple deaths and injuries. The issues of where to draw that line and who gets to draw it remain unresolved. The board has punted to Zuckerberg, and the possible future of online free speech now sits in his hands. This is, bluntly, an uncomfortable thought.
The limits of free speech remain among the most complicated issues in American jurisprudence, especially in the technological wonderland of the 21st century. The search for some form of standardized rules and strictures has been ongoing since the founding of the nation.
In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the famous free speech metric, “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.” For decades, that has served as a simple yardstick for the limits of speech.
As with all issues of speech, however, the matter is not as straightforward as it seems. The case that inspired Holmes’s iconic line, Schneck vs. United States, actually stands as one of the most viciously anti-speech decisions the court has ever handed down. Charles Schneck, a socialist, was charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act for handing out pamphlets condemning the draft during World War I. Holmes’s “fire,” in short, was an activist protesting a war. This garbage anti-speech standard stood until it was partially overturned by the landmark Brandenberg v. Ohio decision in 1969, some 50 years later and in the middle of yet another war.
Remember this the next time you see that “fire in a crowded theater” line. It sounds entirely straightforward, pithy even, yet its history is one of suppression and militaristic fearmongering. It will serve no use for the social media giants trying to figure out where to draw the line. Fire in a theater, indeed.
Moreover, what we have here in the Facebook Board’s decision is a matter of ethics, and not an actual legal statement. Bluntly, nobody has a “right” to a Facebook account, and free speech laws apply as protections from state and federal actions, not corporate decisions. The board has no inherent legal power, and these questions of legality will remain in place until a court has a flesh-and-blood case it can rule on, which would set the legal precedent going forward.
As corporate titans, politicians, the media and the rest of us wrestle with the concept of free speech in the immediacy of a wired world, Donald Trump will remain mostly muzzled down in Florida for the time being. This is nothing but a stupendous public good, as he has not backed off one inch from his championing of the Capitol attackers and his ruinous lies about a stolen election.
Trump still largely controls the Republican Party, and has a massive civilian following at his back. Were he at the bottom of the well, he would still retain the power to blow up the news cycle if he so chose, and could raise a million dollars an hour while he was at it. The board’s decision changes none of this, and answers no larger questions. It will remain quieter around here, though, and for now that will have to do.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Have you enjoyed the quiet? I hope so, because it might be over. According to a report in Tuesday’s Washington Post, a cobbled clutch of “experts” from Facebook that calls itself the “Oversight Board” will soon decide whether or not to let Donald Trump back on the platform. This Board, which the Post says is “a less than one-year-old body that describes itself as an ‘experiment’ in the regulation of online speech,” will render its decision on Wednesday.
Once settled, this decision will likely set the bar for what constitutes the acceptable-to-corporate-ownership boundaries of permissible free speech on social media, and will likewise be the precedent for how world leaders are treated by Facebook and other platforms going forward.
There is every possibility that tomorrow will return us to the Age of Bad Noise. If the Board sides with power over common sense, Trump (along a whole lot of other tinpot autocrats) can continue polluting our minds with paranoid ranting on free social media, and the hapless press will, of course, amplify their every bent thought and twisted accusation. Why? Because, as ever, it’s good television.
It is difficult to quantify the damage done by Trump’s flagrant misuse of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (and God help us if Twitter ever lets him back in). Here was a leader bereft of morals and out for blood, able at any moment in the day to slather the political discussion with lies, threats, complaints and vapid declarations of victory. Even now, I remember how hard it was to navigate the signal-to-noise ratio on a busy Trump Twitter day. It was like trying to collect a thought in the middle of a rock storm.
The din may have felt new to us when the Trump era hit, but in one pointed way, the former president’s use of social media to confound and unhinge the national discourse is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Specifically, it is a tactic long used by fascists seeking to gain and hold power. The idea is not to debate, but to damage debate beyond repair so that even the simplest facts are open to question. In such a muddled, confused environment, fascism can flourish.
What is fascism, besides being a serious word not to be bandied about lightly? Nazi fascism was its own specific ethos, outlined in excruciating detail by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s concept of fascism was captured in the Treccani Encyclopedia. In Spain, fascist leader Francisco Franco had his own ideas on fascist Catholicism, and fascists in the U.S. have spent decades attempting to unite their ideology with splinter Evangelical Christianity.
Is there a collective definition for fascism amid all these varieties, and if so, do Donald Trump and “Trumpism” fall into that spectrum? Celebrated author Umberto Eco, himself a survivor of European fascism, endeavored to create precisely that sort of collective definition, which he called “ur-Fascism” in a 1995 essay for The New York Review of Books.
“Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations,” he wrote. “But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
Eco fashioned 14 “features” of ur-Fascism to explain the overall phenomenon. The first of these is a fanatical adherence to tradition, something Trump used to create his entire political persona: I will bring us back to better days, when people respected and honored all the things you believe in.
The second feature is a rejection of modernism, which again has become a staple of current Republican groupthink. This new world is happening too fast, too many people are getting rights they shouldn’t have. Modernism is the death of tradition, a fact Trump has used to great effect.
The third feature, irrationalism, preaches action for action’s sake, thoughtless, heedless, bereft of self-awareness. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection,” writes Eco. “Thinking is a form of emasculation.” You tell me who you think that sounds like.
The fourth feature is the complete dismissal of analytical criticism. One does not question the leader, the party, or the actions that have been taken. “For ur-Fascism,” writes Eco, “disagreement is treason.” That line may as well have been at the top of the 2020 Republican platform, had they bothered to make one.
The fifth feature is a radical hatred of diversity. Fascism requires rigid adherence to a basic way of being, a code, a slate of honored traditions. Outsiders are to be feared and shunned in the quest to create a perfectly homogenized society. “Thus,” writes Eco, “Fascism is racist by definition.” See: Trump’s border and immigration policies.
The sixth feature states that ur-Fascism derives its power from individual or social frustration. This perhaps more than the others, is the hallmark of Trumpism, the iron spine of its power and influence. Millions of people who feel left behind in this rapidly changing world grapple with fear and fury, and Trump taps that aquifer with a deftly swung sledgehammer.
Six features in, and we have checked every box with a heavy marker. The other features — loud nationalism, jealousy of the enemy, a permanent state of conflict, disdain for elites and elitism, the championing of the masculine, a populism that preaches rights only for the righteous few, and the creation of a new vocabulary that stifles complex and critical reasoning — are all straight out of the Trumpian playbook. Umberto Eco seems to have seen Donald Trump coming for 20 years.
If Trump is allowed back on Facebook, he will again pursue an aggressive campaign of chaos aimed at disrupting the essential workings of democracy to his own ends, and he already has a devoted mass following.
The Facebook “Board” should let the silence rule a while longer. Trump and his followers aren’t here to talk, or to share, or even to lead. They are here to break things, as evidenced on January 6. Don’t let them.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Imagine this scenario: A month before the vote on the federal budget, progressives in Congress declare, “We’ve studied President Biden’s proposed $753 billion military budget, an increase of $13 billion from Trump’s already inflated budget, and we can’t, in good conscience, support this.”
Now that would be a show-stopper, particularly if they added, “So we have decided to stand united, arm in arm, as a block of ‘no’ votes on any federal budget resolution that fails to reduce military spending by 10 to 30 percent. We stand united against a federal budget resolution that includes upwards of $30 billion for new nuclear weapons — slated to ultimately cost nearly $2 trillion. We stand united in demanding the $50 billion earmarked to maintain all 800 overseas bases, including the new one under construction on Okinawa, be reduced by at least one-third, because it’s time we scaled back on plans for global domination.”
“Ditto,” they say, “for the billions the president wants for the arms-escalating Space Force, one of Trump’s worst ideas, right up there with hydroxychloroquine to cure COVID-19. And, no, we don’t want to escalate our troop deployments for a military confrontation with China in the South China Sea. It’s time to ‘right-size’ the military budget and demilitarize our foreign policy.”
Progressives uniting as a block to resist out-of-control military spending would be a no-nonsense exercise of raw power, reminiscent of the way the right-wing Freedom Caucus challenged the traditional Republicans in the House in 2015. Without progressives on board, President Biden might not be able to secure enough votes to pass a federal budget that would then greenlight the reconciliation process needed for his broad domestic agenda.
For years, progressives in Congress have complained about the bloated military budget. In 2020, 93 members in the House and 23 in the Senate voted to cut the Pentagon budget by 10% and invest those funds instead in critical human needs. A House Spending Reduction Caucus, co-chaired by Reps. Barbara Lee of California and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, emerged with 22 members on board, including all four members of the “Squad” but also quite a few more moderate or mainstream Democrats.
We also have the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest in Congress, now with almost 100 members in the House and Senate. Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., is all for cutting military spending. “We’re in the midst of a crisis that has left millions of families unable to afford food, rent and bills,” she told the Nation. “But at the same time, we’re dumping billions of dollars into a bloated Pentagon budget. Don’t increase defense spending. Cut it — and invest that money into our communities.”
Now is the time for these congresspeople to turn their talk into action.
Consider the context. Biden urgently wants to move forward on his American Families Plan rolled out in his recent address to Congress. The plan would tax the rich to invest $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years in universal preschool, two years of tuition-free community college, expanded health care coverage and paid family medical leave.
In the spirit of FDR, Biden also wants to put America back to work with a $2 trillion infrastructure program that will begin to fix our decades-old broken bridges, crumbling sewer systems and rusting water pipes. This could be his legacy, a Green New Deal-lite to transition workers out of the dying fossil fuel industry.
But Biden won’t get his infrastructure program and American Families Plan with higher taxes on the rich, almost 40% on income for corporations and those earning $400,000 or more a year, unless Congress first passes a budget resolution that includes a top line for military and non-military spending. Both the budget resolution and the reconciliation bill that would follow are filibuster-proof and only require a simple majority in the House and Senate to pass.
Easy.
Maybe not.
To flex their muscles, Republicans may refuse to vote for a budget resolution crafted by the Democratic Party that would open the door to big spending on public goods, such as pre-kindergarten and expanded health care coverage. That means Biden would need every Democrat in the House and Senate on board to approve his budget resolution for military and non-military spending.
So how’s it looking?
In the Senate, Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a state that went for Trump over Biden more than two to one, wants to scale back Biden’s infrastructure proposal, but hasn’t sworn to vote down a budget resolution. As for Sen. Bernie Sanders, the much-loved progressive, ordinarily he might balk at a record high military budget. But if the budget resolution ushers in a reconciliation bill that lowers the age of Medicare eligibility to 60 or 55, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee might feel compelled to hold his fire.
That leaves antiwar activists wondering if Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a critic of the Pentagon budget and “nuclear modernization,” would consider stepping up as the lone holdout in the Senate, refusing to vote for a budget that includes billions for new nuclear weapons. Perhaps with a push from outraged constituents in Massachusetts, Warren could be convinced to take this bold stand. Another potential holdout could be California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who co-chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, the committee that oversees budgeting for nuclear weapons. In 2014, Feinstein described the U.S. nuclear arsenal program as “unnecessarily and unsustainably large.”
Over in the House, Biden needs at least 218 of the 222 Democrats to vote for the budget resolution expected to hit the floor in June or July. But what if he can’t get to 218? What if at least five members of the House voted no — or even just threatened to — because the top line for military spending was too high and the budget included new “money pit” land-based nuclear missiles to replace 450 Minuteman III ICBMs, deployed since the 1970s.
Polls show that most Democrats oppose “nuclear modernization” — a euphemism for a plan that is anything but modern, given that 50 countries have signed onto the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would make nuclear weapons illegal, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires the U.S. to pursue nuclear disarmament to avoid a catastrophic accident or intentional nuclear holocaust.
Now is the time for progressive congressional luminaries such as the Squad’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Presley to unite with Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Jayapal, as well as Lee, Pocan and others in the House Spending Reduction Caucus to stand as a block against a bloated military budget.
Will they have the courage to unite behind such a cause? Would they be willing to play hardball and gum up the works on the way to Biden’s progressive domestic agenda? Odds will improve if constituents barrage them with phone calls, emails and visible protests. In a time of pandemic, it makes no sense to approve a military budget that is 90 times the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The billions saved from “right-sizing” the Pentagon could provide critical funds for addressing the climate crisis. Just as we support putting an end to our endless wars, we also support putting an end to our endless cycle of exponential military spending. This is the moment to demand a substantial cut in the Pentagon budget — and to defund new nuclear weapons.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Guantánamo conundrum never seems to end.
Twelve years ago, I had other expectations. I envisioned a writing project that I had no doubt would be part of my future: an account of Guantánamo’s last 100 days. I expected to narrate in reverse, the episodes in a book I had just published, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, about — well, the title makes it all too obvious — the initial days at that grim offshore prison. They began on January 11, 2002, as the first hooded prisoners of the American war on terror were ushered off a plane at that American military base on the island of Cuba.
Needless to say, I never did write that book. Sadly enough, in the intervening years, there were few signs on the horizon of an imminent closing of that U.S. military prison. Weeks before my book was published in February 2009, President Barack Obama did, in fact, promise to close Guantánamo by the end of his first year in the White House. That hope began to unravel with remarkable speed. By the end of his presidency, his administration had, in fact, managed to release 197 of the prisoners held there without charges — many, including Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the subject of the film The Mauritanian, had also been tortured — but 41 remained, including the five men accused but not yet tried for plotting the 9/11 attacks. Forty remain there to this very day.
Nearly 20 years after it began, the war in Afghanistan that launched this country’s Global War on Terror and the indefinite detention of prisoners in that facility offshore of American justice is now actually slated to end. President Biden recently insisted that it is indeed “time to end America’s longest war” and announced that all American troops would be withdrawn from that country by September 11th, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States.
It makes sense, of course, that the conclusion of those hostilities would indeed be tied to the closure of the now-notorious Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Unfortunately, for reasons that go back to the very origins of the war on terror, ending the Afghan part of this country’s “forever wars” may not presage the release of those “forever prisoners,” as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg so aptly labeled them years ago.
Biden and Guantánamo
Just as President Biden has a history, dating back to his years as Obama’s vice-president, of wanting to curtail the American presence in Afghanistan, so he called years ago for the closure of Guantánamo. As early as June 2005, then-Senator Biden expressed his desire to shut that facility, seeing it as a stain on this country’s reputation abroad.
At the time, he proposed that an independent commission take a look at Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations as to its future. “But,” he said then, “I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don’t, let go.” Sixteen years later, he has indeed put in motion an interagency review to look into that detention facility’s closing. Hopefully, once he receives its report, his administration can indeed begin to shut the notorious island prison down. (And this time, it could even work.)
It’s true that, in 2021, the idea of shutting the gates on Guantánamo has garnered some unprecedented mainstream support. As part of his confirmation process, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for instance, signaled his support for its closure. And Congress, long unwilling to lend a hand, has offered some support as well. On April 16th, 24 Democratic senators signed a letter to the president calling that facility a “symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses” that “continues to harm U.S. national security” and demanding that it be shut.
As those senators wrote,
“For nearly two decades, the offshore prison has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States’ ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world. In addition to the $540 million in wasted taxpayer dollars each year to maintain and operate the facility, the prison also comes at the price of justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families, who are still waiting for trials to begin.”
Admittedly, the number of signatories on that letter raises many questions, including why there aren’t more (and why there isn’t a single Republican among them). Is it just a matter of refusing to give up old habits or does it reflect a lack of desire to address an issue long out of the headlines? Where, for example, was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s name, not to mention those other 25 missing Democratic senatorial signatures?
And there’s another disappointment lurking in its text. While those senators correctly demanded a reversal of the Trump administration’s “erroneous and troubling legal positions” regarding the application of international and domestic law to Guantánamo, they failed to expand upon the larger context of that forever nightmare of imprisonment, lawlessness, and cruelty that affected the war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo as well as at the CIA’s “black sites” around the world.
Still, that stance by those two-dozen senators is significant, since Congress has, in the past, taken such weak positions on closing the prison. As such, it provides some hope for the future.
For the rest of Congress and the rest of us, when thinking about finally putting Guantánamo in the history books, it’s important to remember just what a vast deviation it proved to be from the law, justice, and the norms of this society. It’s also worth thinking about the American “detainees” there in the context of what normally happens when wars end.
Prisoners of War
Defying custom and law, the American war in Afghanistan broke through norms like a battering ram through a gossamer wall. Guantánamo was created in just that context, a one-of-a-kind institution for this country. Now, so many years later, it’s poised to break through yet another norm.
Usually, at the end of hostilities, battlefield detainees are let go. As Geneva Convention III, the law governing the detention and treatment of prisoners of war, asserts: “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.”
That custom of releasing prisoners has, in practice, pertained not only to those held on or near the battlefield but even to those detained far from the conflict. Before the Geneva Conventions were created, the custom of releasing such prisoners was already in place in the United States. Notably, during World War II, the U.S. held 425,000 mostly German prisoners in more than 500 camps in this country. When the war ended, however, they were released and the vast majority of them were returned to their home countries.
When it comes to the closure of Guantánamo, however, we can’t count on such an ending. Two war-on-terror realities stand in the way of linking the coming end of hostilities in Afghanistan to the shutting down of that prison. First, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed right after the 9/11 attacks was not geographically defined or limited to the war in Afghanistan. It focused on but was not confined to two groups, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as anyone else who had contributed to the attacks of 9/11. As such, it was used as well to authorize military engagements — and the capture of prisoners — outside Afghanistan. Since 2001, in fact, it has been cited to authorize the use of force in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.Of the 780 prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay at one time or another, more than a third came from Afghanistan; the remaining two-thirds were from 48 other countries.
A second potential loophole exists when it comes to the release of prisoners as that war ends. The administration of George W. Bush rejected the very notion that those held at Guantánamo were prisoners of war, no matter how or where they had been captured. As non-state actors, according to that administration, they were exempted from prisoner of war status, which is why they were deliberately labeled “detainees.”
Little wonder then that, despite Secretary of Defense Austin’s position on Guantánamo, as the New York Times recently reported, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “argued that there was no direct link between its future and the coming end to what he called the ‘mission’ in Afghanistan.”
In fact, even if that congressional authorization for war and the opening of Guantánamo on which it was based never were solely linked to the conflict in Afghanistan, it’s time, almost two decades later, to put an end to that quagmire of a prison camp and the staggering exceptions that it’s woven into this country’s laws and norms since 2002.
A “Forever Prison”?
The closing of Guantánamo would finally signal an end to the otherwise endless proliferation of exceptions to the laws of war as well as to U.S. domestic and military legal codes. As early as June 2004, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor flagged the possibility that a system of indefinite detention at Guantánamo could create a permanent state of endless legal exceptionalism.
She wrote an opinion that month in a habeas corpus case for the release of a Guantánamo detainee, the dual U.S.-Saudi citizen Yaser Hamdi, warning that the prospect of turning that military prison into a never-ending exception to wartime detention and its laws posed dangers all its own. As she put it, “We understand Congress’ grant of authority for the use of ‘necessary and appropriate force’ to include the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict, and our understanding is based on longstanding law-of-war principles.” She also acknowledged that, “If the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war, that [the] understanding [of release upon the end of hostilities] may unravel. But,” she concluded, “that is not the situation we face as of this date.”
Sadly enough, 17 years later, it turns out that the detention authority may be poised to outlive the use of force. Guantánamo has become an American institution at the cost of $13 million per prisoner annually. The system of offshore injustice has, by now, become part and parcel of the American system of justice — our very own “forever prison.”
The difficulty of closing Guantánamo has shown that once you move outside the laws and norms of this country in a significant way, the return to normalcy becomes ever more problematic — and the longer the exception, the harder such a restoration will be. Remember that, before his presidency was over, George W. Bush went on record acknowledging his preference for closing Guantánamo. Obama made it a goal of his presidency from the outset. Biden, with less fanfare and the lessons of their failures in mind, faces the challenge of finally closing America’s forever prison.
With all that in mind, let me offer you a positive twist on this seemingly never-ending situation. I won’t be surprised if, in fact, President Biden actually does manage to close Guantánamo. He may not do so as a result of the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan, but because he seems to have a genuine urge to shut the books on the war on terror, or at least the chapter of it initiated on 9/11.
And if he were also to shut down that prison, in the spirit of that letter from the Democratic senators, it would be because of Guantánamo’s gross violations of American laws and norms. While the letter did not go so far as to name the larger war-on-terror sins of the past, it did at least draw attention directly to the wrongfulness of indefinite detention as a system created expressly to evade the law — and one that brought ill-repute to the United States globally.
That closure should certainly happen under President Biden. After all, any other course is not only legally unacceptable, but risks perpetuating the idea that this country continues to distrust the principles of law, human rights, and due process – indeed, the very fundamentals of a democratic system.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A new poll says that most of us are optimistic about the country’s future (with a margin of error of plus or minus eleventy billion, of course). According to ABC News/Ipsos, a full 64 percent of the country believes we are on the right track. It makes sense: The president of the United States is no longer screaming at them 20 hours a day about whatever happens to pass his screen. New COVID-19 infections are down by almost a quarter, and the number of COVID deaths has also dropped. Close to half the country has been at least partially vaccinated. The weather is turning, and opportunities for outdoor activities are expanding.
Yet the home front news is far from all good, polls notwithstanding. Scientists and public health experts are rapidly concluding that achieving herd immunity in the U.S. may be out of reach, due in no small part to vaccine hesitancy on the part of millions of Republicans and evangelical Christians, who somehow believe they are assisting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign by shunning the needle.
Many of the people gumming up herd immunity are doing so out of ideological purity. The irony here is that Trump and members of his administration spent last winter arguing that we should let the virus run wild. Sure, it might kill millions, they said, but we’ll nail herd immunity at the end of that road of bones. Once those wreckers were dispossessed of power, it was hoped the new administration might be able to convince a preponderance of the people that the vaccines are safe, effective and devoid of politics.
To date, that has not happened to a sufficient degree. “Instead,” reports The New York Times, “[medical experts] are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.”
Not great, entirely galling, but better than where we were… yet there is an illusory element to all this new data and the happy feelings they bring. This hard-won moment is unbelievably fragile, and for one simple reason: Borders are a legal fiction that COVID-19 and its variants could not give less of a damn about, and COVID is still very much on the move.
India: “After a devastating week of soaring infections, India reported more than 400,000 new cases Saturday, a global record. Experts believe that number will climb even higher in the coming days, an unimaginable burden for a health system already under siege with hospitals issuing pleas for oxygen,” reports The Washington Post. “The powerful resurgence of infections in India — a country where cases had ebbed just months earlier — is also a reminder that the coronavirus is far from controlled around the world, even with vaccination rates climbing in many countries.”
South America: “At least 100,000 Brazilians have died in the last 36 days and 100,000 more are expected to lose their lives before July,” reports the Guardian. “Last week South America, home to 5.5% of the world’s population, suffered nearly 32 percent of all reported Covid deaths. ‘What’s happening is a catastrophe,’ Argentina’s health minister, Carla Vizzotti, admitted as her country’s Covid restrictions were extended until late May.”
The U.S. is rushing aid to India, and the Biden administration claims that it is doing everything it can to help that nation weather the storm, though clearly more could be done. Brazil’s pleas for help, by contrast, are being generally ignored by the world at present. Jair Bolsonaro is not the one being punished here; the people of Brazil are suffering.
Moreover, if COVID’s history is any guide, what is happening in those countries will not stay in those countries. When it arrives here — when, not if — this new wave of COVID and its variants will find a half-vaccinated nation in a pretty good mood, and that good mood will sour like milk left out in the sun. A country still fighting over masks, a country that prioritizes capitalism’s profits over its own people, is not ready to confront any number of the worst-case scenarios that lurk at the business end of this threat. That must change, immediately.
“There is no such thing as the State,” notes poet W.H. Auden in September 1, 1939, “and no one exists alone.”
The fictions of borders and “rugged individualism” must be dismissed out of hand, for we are all in this together. If the COVID crisis is not immediately treated by the U.S. and the world as a global crisis, if a global solution is not collectively achieved, we will eventually arrive at a global calamity so bleak, even the poets will be wordstruck.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As campus-based and grassroots movements against anti-Black and racist state violence continue to proliferate around the globe, university police and “campus safety” infrastructures and policies are rapidly losing their institutional legitimacy. Multiple national organizations, including Scholars for Social Justice and the American Studies Association, have endorsed the call for college and university campuses to join the national “Cops Off Campus” May 3, 2021, “Day of Refusal” and to organize with each other to contribute to solidarity activities throughout “Abolition May.” In addition to more than 30 University of California and California State University campuses, colleges and universities across the continent are participating in this month-long mobilization, including the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago, the City College of San Francisco, the University of Texas, Yale University, San Bernardino Valley College, the University of Virginia, the City University of New York, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania.
The May 3 Day of Refusal is a one-day commitment to withdraw all labor and participation from college and university activities, including (virtual) classes, events/webinars, email correspondence and administrative meetings. This is the inaugural mobilization of Abolition May, which Cops Off Campus conceives as an open invitation to organize and participate in a wide variety of community-building actions, including abolitionist teach-ins, mutual aid drives for vulnerable people on and near campuses, autonomously organized town halls, banner postings, street theater, walking tours focusing on sites of past police and university violence, and the creation of memorials commemorating people killed by police.
As this movement unfolds, the University of California (UC) administration is actively engaged in a repressive and reactionary response to the crises shaping the current historical moment. A series of proposed revisions to the systemwide UC police policy will expand the capacity for statewide police militarization (via “Systemwide Response Teams”), enhance UC Police Department (UCPD) surveillance technologies (by distributing body-worn cameras), and further weaponize the UCPD’s “Use of Force” policies. The implications of this administrative proposal are deeply concerning, not only because UC is among the largest public university systems in the world, but also because it has historically served as an experimental ground for the development of modern police technologies and protocols.
Students, faculty, staff and surrounding communities are identifying and confronting the UC administration’s approach to police reform through vigorous abolitionist organizing. Central to this work is the embrace of rigorous shared analysis, education and planning that fundamentally challenge the institutional assumptions underlying police-dependent notions of campus safety. Alongside UC Student Association leader (and UC Riverside student) Naomi Waters, San Francisco State University student leader Ja’Corey Bowens and Laney College professor Kimberly King, I participated in the presentation of a clear abolitionist response to the ongoing problem of university and college police presence during the April 21 CalMatters/KQED (Los Angeles) event, “The Future of Campus Policing.”
During this discussion, the four of us collectively reframed notions of “safety” and “security” by centering dynamic, decriminalizing, community-accountable infrastructures that deprovincialize college and university campuses, emphasizing how institutions like UC have historically had gentrifying, disastrously criminalizing effects on surrounding people and geographies. The resulting debate with the UC Regents Chair John Perez and UC Davis Police Chief Joseph Farrow exemplified the recent and remarkable shift in the content and parameters of critical public discussions of police power. Such debates are increasingly engaging with abolitionist frameworks and thus no longer accept the severe limitations of reformist scripts. While the impact of such invigorated debates on the UC administration’s policing policy is still to be determined, it seems clear that the campus police presence is steadily losing credibility. The administrative leadership can no longer presume consent to its definition of “campus safety.”
Abolitionist security and safety measures directly confront and address the insecurities — housing, food, health, economic, and otherwise — that are not only created and reproduced by colleges and universities, but are also reinforced by their policed relation to surrounding (working-class and poor, unhoused, Black, Indigenous, Brown, undocumented, criminalized) communities.
In contrast to this dynamic abolitionist approach, the UC administration proposes to reform, expand and further militarize its police force in the name of safety, peace and security. Three aspects of its plan are worth special attention, especially as they are likely to influence other institutions’ approaches to police reform: the creation of Systemwide Response Teams, deployment of body-worn cameras, and preemptive sanction of police violence and intimidation through enhanced use-of-force policies.
On “Systemwide Response Teams (SRTs)”
The “MISSION STATEMENT” of SRTs states,
1602. The mission of the University of California SRT is to maintain a trained team of sworn personnel with the skills and equipment readily available to assist local campuses to:
(a) Facilitate and protect the Constitutional Rights of all persons;
(b) Keep the peace and protect life and property;
(c) Protect lawful activity while identifying and isolating unlawful behavior;
(d) Provide dignitary protection; and
(e) Provide training and other assistance when requested and appropriate.
It is a shock to the conscience and ethical sensibility of many UC students, educators and workers that, after a year of worldwide uprisings against police violence, the UC administration is proposing the creation of a new, specialized police force that significantly expands the power, militarization and personnel of the existing UCPD.
The SRT apparatus facilitates multicampus police mobilizations for the purpose of controlling and suppressing mass demonstrations on and near UC campuses. By way of example, the provisions cited above would allow (if not obligate) the UCPD to convene SRTs for the purposes of deterring, repressing, and/or neutralizing public protests of UC Regents’ meetings, while utilizing SRTs as a privileged form of paramilitary protection for visiting “dignitaries” (e.g. ambassadors and prominent state officials) representing governments that may be widely criticized for historical and ongoing atrocities, including apartheid, colonial occupation and genocidal violence. (This provision seems especially well-suited for targeting mobilizations of solidarity with Palestinian liberation that challenge the policies and asymmetrical violence of the Israeli state.)
The paramilitary nature of the SRTs is crystallized in the proposed policy’s provision for the assignment of special personnel “to meet operational needs,” including “grenadiers.” According to the U.S. Army’s “Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad” Field Manual, a grenadier is a soldier equipped with a grenade launcher for the purpose of “providing limited high-angle fire over ‘dead space.’” According to the University of Wisconsin police, the grenadier is an officer who has been trained in the use of “Chemical Agents/Munitions and their delivery systems.” Notably, the UC policy does not provide a clear definition of this personnel category, and the grenadier’s capacity to engage in tactics of campus-based counterinsurgency is left to speculation.
On “Body Worn Audio/Video Systems (BWVs)”
The proposed revision to UC police policy allows UCPD officers extraordinarily wide latitude to exercise “discretionary activation” when it comes to use of their body-worn video cameras (BWVs). They are given enough room for subjective interpretation of situations that they can essentially activate or deactivate their cameras anytime they wish, with rather loose requirements for post facto justification. Further, there is no clear consequence for failing to activate (or unjustifiably deactivating) BWVs, and there are also no apparent consequences for losing or “accidentally” erasing the BWV footage itself.
By way of example, “1520. Modification, Alteration, or Deletion” states, “no employee shall modify, alter, or delete video or audio once recorded by the [body-worn] camera, except as authorized by Department policy,” yet there is no accompanying clarification of penalties if the policy is violated. Such toothless and deceiving policies effectively create superficial, bureaucratic approaches to “police accountability” that serve to expand the technology and judicial impunity of policing.
It is well established that even when used according to prescribed guidelines, police-worn body cameras have never definitively reduced the frequency or intensity of police violence. Recorded footage is generally not accessible to the public, and police administrators (including officers themselves) are afforded significant privileges in handling the preservation and distribution of such recordings. (Keep in mind that the world learned of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police through the video recording of a courageous 17-year-old minor, while former Officer Derek Chauvin’s body cam footage was not released until well into his criminal trial 10 months later.) Further, increased distribution of body-worn cameras contributes to the enhancement of criminalizing surveillance technologies, exacerbates privacy concerns, and often significantly increases police personnel and budgets under the guise of reform.
On the “Use of Force Policy”
The proposed revision to the UCPD’s Use of Force policy weaponizes fantastically broad definitions of “active resistance” and “assaultive resistance” to police authority. As defined in the proposed policy, these terms allow for extraordinarily generous interpretations of “resistance” that retroactively justify police force, potentially including deadly or maiming police violence; for example, the category of “active resistance” includes any observation of a policed subject’s “bracing, tensed muscles,” while the definition of “extreme agitation” — “agitation so severe that the person can be dangerous to themselves or others” — is precisely the rationale used to justify numerous anti-Black police killings, including Ma’Khia Bryant, Laquan McDonald, and many others.
Similarly, the definition of “non-compliance” allows police the widest possible latitude to make subjective judgments of “physical gestures, stances, and observable mannerisms.” Such inferences are entirely saturated by the ideological, symbolic and historical forces of anti-Blackness, racism, sexism, gender normativity, ableism and ageism.
The Use of Force policy is thus a potentially devastating weapon of repression, intimidation and criminalization because the scope of its implementation remains almost entirely determined by the perceptions of police officers themselves. Section 803 states: “reasonableness of force will be judged from the perspective of an objectively reasonable officer in the same situation, based on the circumstances perceived by the officer at the time.” (Emphasis added.)
It is necessary to raise fundamental questions over the institutional assumptions that enable and allegedly necessitate such policies, which are usually framed by administrators as existing for the protection of those who are being policed. Use of force protocols neither prevent nor curb anti-Black, racist, gendered and ableist police violence. To the contrary, these policies establish the bureaucratic and legal premises for ensuring that police threat, harm and fatality remain central to “campus safety” infrastructures.
Abolishing Normalized Institutional Violence
While there are other aspects of the University of California’s proposed policy that call for critical examination, these few examples reflect the need to collectively challenge the normalized conditions of institutional violence that crystallize in the enduring presence of the UC police force. The UCPD’s enormous infrastructure of privilege and power (budgetary, juridical, and otherwise) has toxified one of the world’s largest public universities for well over half a century. At a moment in which people worldwide are questioning the institution of policing, it is both possible and necessary to challenge the very existence of police on college and university campuses.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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For several years, I have met weekly with a remarkable group of mothers and one father who, like me, are fighting for the release of their adult children from Chicago-area prisons. We call ourselves the Mothers of the Kidnapped. My new sisters and brother, all in a group no parent wants to join, speak powerfully to the loss of their children and to the agony of being caught up in a police and trial process that actively works against us and the supposed rights of our children to access a transparent and even-handed legal system.
This month we celebrated the long overdue release of Gerald Reed, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1990 after he was tortured and framed by disgraced Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge. We also raised up his mother, Armanda Shackelford, for her steadfast work over 30 years to secure his freedom. But, as Gerald and Armanda both noted in a press conference, this goes far deeper than Gerald’s case, when so many more people remain behind bars, including those convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has done right in Gerald’s case, and we thank him, but he can do so much more to free the wrongfully convicted and others who are incarcerated, as can other state governments around the country.
What we have learned through discussing our children’s cases is that many Chicago police officers and detectives are extraordinarily corrupt. From Kenneth Boudreau, to Jack Halloran, and James O’Brien to Jon Burge and Reynaldo Guevara — accused in the framing or coerced confession of more than 200 people, including my sons Juan and Rosendo — we know this to be the case.
Moreover, many judges are complicit in the falsehoods that prosecutors, police and detectives convey to win convictions. Our children have been entrapped in a web of collaboration involving judges, prosecutors and police officers.
In recent weeks we saw Chicago police have to walk back their initial claim that 13-year-old Adam Toledo was killed in an “armed confrontation.” Cook County prosecutor James Murphy was placed on administrative leave after wrongly claiming that the child was armed when shot by police.
Judges seem to feel no urgency to change this lethal system. When we show up to court, they dehumanize us, disrespect us and blame us. They forget to bring the correct papers, show up late or don’t show up at all. They are on one side of a legal line while Black, Brown and economically struggling white parents are on the other.
Justice is supposed to be “swift.” But what happens if you’re on the receiving end of a judge meting out a decision based on falsehoods and crooked police behavior? Then the wheels of so-called “justice” turn slow.
Last month, members of Mothers of the Kidnapped were part of a virtual meeting with staff for State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. Unfortunately, Foxx did not meet with us personally. We were told to “be patient.” But some of us have been contending with unjust decisions for a decade or more. That language, perhaps well-intended, simply does not sit well when one’s child has languished in prison for years for something he didn’t do.
During our now-online calls with one another, I have seen a framed picture of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass on the wall of one of my sisters. When told to “be patient,” I cannot help but think of King’s words: “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
But, in fact, it is worse than that. The original sin here is not that we are waiting years rather than months or weeks for court reversals. The original wrongdoing is that our sons were beaten up by police and convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. One second behind bars is too much. One angry detective grilling them over something they did not do is too much.
All of us, in Mothers of the Kidnapped, have undergone the worst sort of learning process. Time and again doors are closed to us, all of which has been made worse in the last year by COVID-19 slowing our efforts to free our children. Our names are Denice Bronis, Bertha Escamilla, April Ward, Armanda Shackleford, Regina Russell, April Ward, Rosemary Cade and Frank Ornelas. All of us have been trapped, trying to free our children from a system that was never meant to work for us. We are not alone. Our struggle is wrapped up in the struggle of all incarcerated people and their loved ones. Whether or not an individual has a mother who can appeal to the sanctity of motherhood to garner support, no human should be caged, and it is not only police torture survivors whose stories matter.
Two hundred years ago, the U.S. legal system prevented Black women from controlling their bodies and reproduction. Yet today, even if we raise our Black and Brown children safely to young adulthood, there is no guarantee that these children will not be stolen from us by an oppressive legal system built on a racist foundation and the vestiges of Black enslavement. The American legal system and police were originally established to patrol Black bodies so it is no wonder that racially charged abuses continue to this day.
Increasingly, I have come to see the cruelty of what we face as an abuse of reproductive justice. Yes, our children were able to survive our city’s gun violence and reach adulthood. But one of the joys of growing older is seeing our children mature and engage with us as equals, not to mention the possibility of seeing the future through grandchildren. These relationships cannot be fully developed through the bars of a prison or the looking glass of a visiting room.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) recently argued that eliminating the filibuster would lead to “serious problems.” According to Manchin, “the Senate is different” than the House, yet “for some reason, people are trying to make the Senate operate the same as the House,” even though “our founding fathers never intended that.”
First of all, eliminating the filibuster will not lead to serious problems. Most U.S. states and most democratic countries around the world don’t allow for legislation to be filibustered. Many such states and countries function just fine. Giving the minority party veto power over widely supported legislation is unnecessary when there are other strong checks and balances in place.
Second, while the Senate today operates much differently than the House thanks to the filibuster, that is not what the “founding fathers” intended. Notably, they did not include the filibuster in the U.S. Constitution, and in 1789, both the Senate and House rulebooks allowed a simple majority to end debate.
Eventually, the Senate decided to revise its rulebook upon the recommendation of Vice President Aaron Burr. One of the rules that was eliminated in 1806 at Burr’s behest was that which allowed a simple majority to end debate. This change was exploited in 1837 when the Senate endured its first filibuster.
Manchin argues that if “regular order in the Senate” is abandoned, “our nation may never see stable governing again.” One could argue that after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and refused to concede, characterizing the U.S. system as unreservedly “stable” is perhaps overly generous.
Setting that point aside, it’s important to note that “regular order” in the Senate has evolved over time, as the rules related to the filibuster have changed on several occasions. For example, in 1917, 1974, 1975, 2013 and 2017 senators willingly voted to weaken the filibuster.
In other words, over the last 100 or so years, the Senate has been slowly trying to revert to the filibuster-free era that existed in 1789. Although conservatives frame attempts to abolish the filibuster as a progressive power grab, in reality, it moves the rules that govern the U.S. closer to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.
Manchin asserts that, “[t]he filibuster is a critical tool to protecting … our democratic form of government,” and as such, “[t]here is no circumstance in which [he] will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”
Recall that, at present, 60 votes are needed for legislation to be filibuster-proof. This means that senators from the 21 least-populous states (which would together be 42 senators) could collectively prevent the passage of legislation. The population of the 21 least-populous states equates to only about 11 percent of the country. In essence, the filibuster allows for just over a tenth of the population to hold the rest hostage. This is not the protection of “the minority’s rights,” as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell purports. Rather, this is tyranny of the minority.
Recently, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the budget reconciliation process, which can be used to bypass the filibuster, may be able to be used more often than previously thought. Manchin’s refusal to consider abolishing the filibuster, or even simply weakening it by utilizing the budget reconciliation process, effectively means that McConnell wields a veto on Biden’s legislative proposals, even though Democrats control the presidency, the House and the Senate.
Given that the Senate is evenly divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats (along with independents that caucus with them), a common retort is that the country itself is also evenly divided, and such, Biden’s slim majority shouldn’t be able to “ram through half-baked ideas.” However, because of the population differences between states, in actuality, the 50 Democrats (and their independent colleagues) represent roughly 40 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans. Furthermore, anything that’s dangerously undercooked would likely be ruled unconstitutional by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
An exasperated Woodrow Wilson once stated that the “Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action.” Manchin likes to portray himself as a bipartisan warrior fighting to protect the world’s greatest deliberative body. Unfortunately, the Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body, nor will it ever be, as long as the inherently undemocratic filibuster remains.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) was given an unenviable task on Wednesday evening. His job was to give the GOP case in a speech televised live across the country rebutting President Joe Biden’s first address to both houses of Congress.
Scott’s problem was multifaceted: First, unlike Biden, who is still riding high in the polls — and, 100 days after being sworn in as president, getting higher approval ratings than Trump did at any point in his presidency — Scott, who has been a U.S. senator since 2013, has only a limited national profile. Second, Biden has perfected a speech-making style over the past several months that allows him to pitch progressive policies to his audience while coming across as genial, simply spouting common sense platitudes and a sort of happy populism, in stark contrast to the divisiveness of former president Donald Trump. It’s an approach that makes him a more difficult target for conservative politicians. And, third, most of Biden’s key policies, especially on the economy, on vaccine distribution, on health care, on job investments in clean energy, on tackling climate change and on reimagining the social safety net and tax code, have majority support among the voting public.
Distinctly absent from Biden’s speech to Congress were any of the pyrotechnics of Trump or the poetic oratorical skills of Obama. Instead, his approach is methodical. Over the course of a little more than an hour Biden described a series of policy changes that, if even partially enacted, would represent the biggest shift in American governance in generations.
The president talked openly about the need to unionize workers and about the urgency of tackling economic inequality. He asserted that “trickle-down economics has never worked” and argued that there is something wrong with a system that allowed a few hundred billionaires to accumulate over 1 trillion dollars in new wealth during the pandemic at the same time as 20 million American workers lost their jobs. He called for targeted tax increases on wealthy individuals and large corporations. He demanded comprehensive immigration reform, gun control legislation and huge investments in green technology. He called for the creation of a Health Advanced Research Projects Agency to fund medical innovation and seek cancer cures. He demanded legislation to enforce equal pay for women in the workplace, to ban anti-LGBTQ discriminatory practices, to mandate a $15 per hour minimum wage, as well as 12 weeks a year of paid family and sick leave. He urged Congress to create universal pre-K education and to fully fund community college education for all students using those institutions. He also announced an international vaccination drive to be fueled by American surplus vaccines and technology.
Meanwhile, in a move that disappointed anti-war activists but removed a possible avenue of attack from the right, Biden pledged toughness against Russia and China, and in a regrettable but unsurprising continuity with previous administrations, asserted a foreign policy goal of maintaining economic and military dominance over the two nations.
All of this left Senator Scott little to work with, and, for a purported rising star of the GOP, he really didn’t seem too engaged in the task of delivering an all-out rebuttal of the progressive measures that Biden discussed.
The senator, whose speech lasted just a little over 15 minutes, focused his critique mainly on the “partisanship” of the COVID relief bills passed since Biden’s inauguration, rather than attacking the substance of the bills themselves. “Republicans support everything you think of when you think of infrastructure,” he said. “But again, Democrats want a partisan wish list. They won’t even build bridges to build bridges.”
At a time of massive economic dislocation, much of it triggered by a pandemic that, under Trump’s presidency was allowed to spiral out of control, Scott couldn’t come up with more than a few predictable platitudes about the dynamism of the pre-pandemic Trump-era economy, and clichéd insults with which to critique Biden’s series of complex and big-picture economic proposals. He accused Biden of using the idea of infrastructure and COVID relief investments as a Trojan horse to pass a “liberal wish-list of Big Government waste … plus the biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation.” But there were no real specific, hands-on critiques of the infrastructure plan — probably because most Americans, including large numbers of Republican voters, support that plan.
Meanwhile, Scott made the usual rhetorical gifts expected by the GOP base — accusing Biden of promoting taxpayer-funded abortions and of wanting to pack the Supreme Court (a particularly strange claim given that Biden has been remarkably reluctant to countenance the idea pushed by other Democrats of expanding the court). He also accused Biden of pushing open borders, promoting “Washington schemes or socialist dreams,” and “pulling us further apart.”
At one point Scott did latch onto one actual weak spot for the Democrats: the fact that, as a pandemic response, many Democratic governors allowed public schools in their states to shut down for a whole year — a policy that many parents across the political spectrum were unhappy with. Yet, instead of hammering on this point, Scott merely mentioned it and then moved on to touch on the infrastructure plan and then attack “virtue signaling” activists on America’s left.
Scott’s speech reflected the smallness of the political imagination of the party he represents, and it summed up the modern GOP’s problem. Still in hock to the Trump personality cult, the party has been unable to move on and shape comprehensive, and politically popular, responses to the vast number of big-picture policy changes that Biden is advocating.
And Biden, a skillful politician comfortable in working Washington’s levers of power, is proving to be a surprisingly forceful advocate for an array of big-picture changes to the way the U.S. defines itself.
Biden is taking the public with him, and is using events such as his non-state-of-the-union address on Wednesday night to explain, in easy-to-follow language, the urgency of passing bold and long-lasting legislation on the economy, on health care access, on green investments, on education, on policing, and on moving the needle on racial justice.
In a year convulsed by protests against the police-perpetrated killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black men, women and children, the party line on race pushed by Scott and others in the GOP will be hard for many to stomach. Barely three months after a race-baiting Trump reluctantly left office, Scott — who spoke at some length about his own experiences of racial discrimination and being pulled over for no reason as a Black driver — then looked at the cameras and asked his audience to “Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.”
And in a period in which Republican state legislatures are doing everything in their power to restrict voting rights in ways that disproportionately impact Black communities, Scott argued that all the GOP lawmakers were doing was trying to “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.” How Georgia’s law banning the practice of giving water to people waiting in line to vote fits that analysis, he didn’t attempt to explain, although he did bemoan the “misplaced outrage” of those who argue that voter suppression is discriminatory.
“The real story is always redemption,” Scott said, attempting to rebuff Biden. But the problem with this strategy is that Biden himself, a one-time moderate who has, under considerable pressure from social movements, adopted progressive policies and become more determined to tackle the crises confronting the U.S., would entirely agree. And, on Wednesday night, unlike Senator Scott, he had the policy prescriptions to boost his case.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Here in New Hampshire, the real governing is done at the town level by Boards of Selectmen, a council of elected officials who ride herd over the rawest, purest form of democracy practiced in the country. Majority vote rules, proposals are raised at “town meeting” and subsequently voted on by whoever raises their hand. Sometimes the room is packed, other times most seats go empty, but decisions are always made by the ones who show up.
Last night, for a brief moment, President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress looked like one of those New Hampshire town meetings. Here stands Biden, asking the Board for funds to purchase a new city plow so the streets can get cleared faster after a storm. Better for business and safer for families, is his argument, and it is sound. Oscar Wilde would recognize the scene in an eyeblink.
The mirage, alas, was punctured by the image of Ted Cruz’s eyes rolling up in his head like a guy who’d spent too much time in Cancun. Yes, this was Congress in all of its squalid glory, the man at the podium was the president, but the difference between now and last year is the difference between a friendly shoulder rub and being devoured by a hammerhead shark.
“Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President,” said Biden as he began. Those words had never been spoken in that chamber before. It was an intense moment, a piece of long-awaited history, and seemed to promise a day to come when all three seats in that upper podium will be occupied by women.
As for the content of the speech, well, it was a time warp all its own. Biden’s list of policy proposals represents something of a rewiring of the American experience, from work to family to school to medicine and science, from transportation to elder care. Much of what he proposed came thanks to the sustained pressure of progressives, which started the minute Biden won the nomination.
It was that very slate of markedly progressive proposals that kept the Republicans in their seats as if they were nailed to them. Even behind his mask, the smile on Bernie Sanders’s face when Biden said, “Health care is a right, not a privilege,” could be seen from space.
Could Biden have asked for more in his proposals? Absolutely, and progressive members of the House are marshaling their forces to see if they can improve upon them. “Congressional Democrats are planning to pursue a massive expansion of Medicare as part of President Biden’s new $1.8 trillion economic relief package,” reports The New York Times, “defying the White House after it opted against including a major health overhaul as part of its plan.”
To underscore this effort, newly elected progressive House Rep. Jamaal Bowman offered a rare Democratic rebuttal to a speech delivered by a Democratic president. Bowman praised Biden for his accomplishments to date, before daring him to do more. “The proposals that President Biden has put forward over the last few weeks would represent important steps — but don’t go as big as we’d truly need in order to solve the crises of jobs, climate and care,” said Bowman. “We need to think bigger.”
“With Democratic control of Congress and the White House,” reports Sharon Zhang for Truthout, “Bowman said now is the time to pass the bold policies that he highlighted in his speech. He mentioned climate bills, such as the Green New Deal for Public Housing and Green New Deal for Cities, introduced earlier this month by fellow progressive colleagues, including Ocasio-Cortez, to provide funding for more climate-friendly public housing and cities. Bowman also drew attention to the THRIVE Act, a $10 trillion infrastructure and climate justice bill of which Bowman is a lead sponsor. The bill, Bowman said, could potentially create 15 million union jobs to help the U.S. economy bounce back while at the same time addressing the climate crisis and environmental justice issues.”
There will be more of this, you can count on it, because Biden to date has revealed a very important aspect of his leadership style: When it comes to some issues, at least, he can be pressured and he can be moved. Progressives in Congress intend to use their influence at this unique juncture to maximum effect.
Pundits on the non-Fox networks heaped praise upon Biden and his soft, unassuming delivery. After four years of screams and rants from that podium, an hour of just business, the people’s business, was a balm. Comparisons to Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and even Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” were bandied about.
The president can certainly take that as a compliment, but he ain’t no LBJ, and he ain’t no FDR. Not yet, anyway… and in a very important sense, he should hope to rise above those legacies if he can. Johnson’s grand plans were devoured by a ruinous war in Vietnam, and Roosevelt only achieved his lofty goals after cutting deals with racists and secessionists which exacerbated the horrors of the Jim Crow South.
The nose count does not favor the president at present. “Democratic senators had a 23-seat advantage during Roosevelt’s presidency and a 36-seat advantage during Johnson’s,” according to The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein. That, simply, makes legislative life a hell of a lot easier. Also, and not for nothing, but neither LBJ or FDR had a Joe Manchin lurking like a pulmonary embolism, waiting to find a place to clog up the works.
Biden’s slim majorities, and the short timetable to election 2022, make the road to fulfilling his intentions fraught with peril. Speeches like this are always wish lists. Last night, the president wished for the moon and stars. Now we see how much of it he can get.
The Republican rebuttal by Sen. Tim Scott provided a vivid counterpoint to the agenda set forth by the president. No policy ideas were offered beyond the rote recitation of right-wing culture war grievances. According to Scott, the violent divisions loose in this nation are the fault of Democrats. He said this in response to a speech delivered in the chamber that was sacked by hyper-violent Trump voters only four months ago.
At bottom, last night contained an important element of defiance: a full-throated declaration of war against the rancid legacy of Ronald Reagan. “Trickle-down economics has never worked,” the president announced to a mighty roar from half the chamber. Forty years of supply-side feed-the-rich economics has delivered us to this shabby estate, and the agenda laid out last night — if realized — would at long last begin to dismantle that legacy.
Former President Clinton can take note, too: The era of big government is back, maybe. The idea that government can help has been well-served since January, as Biden’s vaccine program has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Infection rates are dropping across the board, and while we have many masked miles to go before we sleep, we are in this better place because competent government has finally served the people like it is supposed to.
The wind at Biden’s back, even with his slim congressional majorities, is the simple fact that his proposals are wildly popular. Combine that with the increased public trust in government that has erupted in 2021, and Republicans face a grim task trying to throw rocks in this road. They will, of course they will, but ‘22 is coming, and the people are watching like hawks.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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I have to talk about Tucker Carlson today, which is a shame. There are eleventy billion more important things popping off right now. India is literally on fire from all the bodies that are burning, thanks to COVID deaths; mass shootings are as common as birdsong this spring; and the giant segment of congressional Republicans who tried to overthrow the government are now pretending it never happened, and might actually get away with it. Even absent all that, I can’t recall a day in my life when Carlson rose to the level of immediately required attention. Alas, the day has arrived.
Before we begin, however, I would ask you to take a few minutes and watch then-Daily Show host Jon Stewart obliterate Carlson on Crossfire in 2004. For those who don’t recall or never saw it, Crossfire was Carlson’s old CNN show, along with Paul Begala, that was canceled almost immediately after Stewart’s appearance. Stewart is generally credited for being responsible for the show’s demise, though Carlson claimed he had quit months before, so there.
Watch it, and keep 2021 Carlson close in mind when you do.
“It’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America,” said Stewart of Carlson and Crossfire as the show opened. “So I wanted to come here today and say: Stop. Here’s just what I wanted to tell you guys. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.”
It only gets better from there. Peak television, that (rivaled only perhaps by comedian Bill Burr’s 12-minute foul-mouthed defenestration of the entire city of Philadelphia, but I digress). Carlson snagged an MSNBC show after Stewart burned Crossfire to the ground, but that was likewise canceled — along with his signature bow tie — a few short years later. After that, Carlson banged around on Dancing With the Stars for a bit (he was the first contestant canceled in season three, thus keeping the streak alive), before finally landing in 2009 on the always-available right-wing lifeboat for irrelevant conservatives: Fox News.
Flash forward 12 years, and my, how things have changed. Back during his CNN and MSNBC days, Carlson always came off as a frat boy two drinks past the minimum who knows just enough karate to get his ass kicked. He put the time in, said all the right terrible things, pushed all the right terrible lies, and was finally given a show of his own.
Now, in the gilded cocoon of his own niche on Fox, Carlson has the freedom to say basically anything without having to worry about a co-host or an audience to shut him down. A network that harbors the likes of Sean Hannity and “Judge” Jeanine Pirro isn’t about to censor Tucker’s boyish charm (shudder).
Every so often, however, he will blow past the low-water mark of his last garbage commentary — like, say, his oft-repeated championing of white nationalist themes… oh, wait, that was just two weeks ago! — and find a whole new bottom of the barrel.
Which brings us to our current estate. Earlier this week, which by the way saw a significant loosening of mask guidelines for vaccinated people by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Carlson took his brain for a long walk off a short pier. “Not even Tony Fauci still pretends that masks are medically necessary,” he lied straight into the camera. “Instead, masks are purely a sign of political obedience, like Kim Il Sung pins in Pyongyang.”
Yep, it’s George Orwell meets Scrubs up in here. Why, the loyalty oath is printed right there on the inside of my hate-mask so I can whisper the words to the words as I plot the death of God while fondling avocados in the supermarket. Oh, P.S., a PBS report from 2/12: “Dr. Anthony Fauci says people will need to wear masks ‘for several, several months’ to avoid the coronavirus as vaccinations are rolled out.”
“It’s our job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in,” Carlson went on to say of the “neurotics” wearing masks in public. “So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate. Ask politely but firmly, ‘Would you please take off your mask. Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable.”
Your mask is making me uncomfortable. This, from a mouthpiece of the party that promulgated the slur “snowflakes” to denigrate people with, you know, actual feelings. We know how welcome those are in the Trumpiverse. Whither comes such sensitivity, Tucker?
“As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal,” he raged. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from seeing someone beating a kid at Walmart: Call the police immediately; contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”
When it happens — and it will — the video of some Tucker fan calling the cops about a mother at a playground with a masked child will go viral at warp speed. THAT PERSON’S CHILD IS WEARING A MASK AND IT MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER. Hey Karen! Your husband Ken/Chad/Terry is on the internet!
As with those who have been fully vaccinated, the CDC has also released guidelines for children participating in summer camp or other group activities. Per The Washington Post: “Campers and staff members should be placed in small groups, or cohorts, to minimize exposure to other people, the CDC said. While in the cohorts, kids should stay at least three feet away from their peers and should wear masks at all times, except while eating, swimming and sleeping. When not masked, or with people outside their cohorts, campers should keep a six-foot distance. Whenever possible, camp activities should happen outside. Campers should avoid indoor sports and games that involve close contact. Disinfect. Frequently.” (Emphasis added.)
Pro tip to Tuckerworld: Among my favorite activities is bringing my 8-year-old daughter to Robin Hood Park so she can frolic with other kids on the playground after a year of effective isolation. It is medicine for the both of us. She wears a mask around the other kids because I cannot be sure if the parents of those kids are being safe in their own sphere, and as my daughter loves to visit her Nana, this precaution has felt wise and safe.
The new CDC guidelines on masks outdoors — again, for vaccinated people — may motivate me to change this habit. I have not yet decided, and it is my decision to make. If some Carlson devotee decides to take a run at me over my daughter’s mask because they are uncomfortable bearing witness to my child abuse, they will be invited to shove themselves up their own arse with such velocity that they quite simply disappear into themselves, like a dying star.
Look, Tucker Carlson is a television clown. After his pet president got his butt kicked in November, and after a segment of his viewers sacked the Capitol in January, Carlson made the calculated business decision to be as far out there as he can be, and he has been rewarded with a noteworthy viewership from the Fox News crowd. The network is still trying to decide how to act post-Trump, they aren’t landing any punches against President Biden worth noting (Dr. Seuss? Hamburgers? Jeez…), and so Carlson is painting the walls of his studio with blood in an attempt to invite the rest of the network to follow him into the darkness.
The so-called “culture war” Carlson is “fighting” is a giant fundraising scam the GOP has been running on its base to amazingly lucrative effect. Fox has been at the vanguard of that phenomenon for decades, and today’s GOP politicians — absent things like, y’know, policy to run on — are following suit so they have cash on hand for the next campaign. Carlson is angling to become the avatar of this scam, because it pays really well.
“The GOP highlights culture-war issues to shake down rank-and-file donors while cutting taxes to please wealthy donors,” conservative columnist Max Boot noted recently. “Republicans have won the presidential popular vote only once since 1988, but they can’t afford to broaden their appeal by embracing a more populist economic agenda or by toning down the divisive social messages because either move would jeopardize the flow of fundraising. The right-wing money machine has become the tail wagging the Republican elephant.”
If that were all there was to this, I would not have bothered giving a day of my life to some yowler on a propaganda network. The problem is, whatever Carlson and the GOP’s financial motives may be, their words have an actual flesh-and-blood effect on the GOP base that believes everything it hears if it comes from the right television station.
Pundits talk about a “divided” nation, but that division is being violently exacerbated by people like Carlson, who take the basic medical necessity of masks in a pandemic and turn it into a reason to accost parents in the park… because they are uncomfortable.
That’s the thing about a mob: It’s comfortable to be within it, even empowering. Everyone within knows that everyone else around them thinks and feels the same way, and they move as one like a wheeling flock of birds. Elements of the pack show the pack they belong to the pack by incanting the acceptable words and thoughts. Carlson’s audience is a mob writ large, bound together online and made braver with company, and he incants the words of bonding on a nightly schedule.
These are frightened people who see their supremacy slipping away. Science as represented by masks, the very idea of sharing cultural influence with “others,” all of this scares them and makes them angry, so they find solace in the rank ignorance of the devoted ranks. Every time Carlson rings a bell like this, they feel stronger, even as their pockets get picked while Fox’s ratings rise.
Look, Tucker Carlson is the living embodiment of low-hanging fruit in the media orchard. Jumping up and down on him is the equivalent of a child mastering “Chopsticks” on a toy piano. I feel dirty even writing his name.
This is actually important, however. Watching Carlson wind himself up into a frothing rage over the Chauvin verdict compels one to believe he means it. Whether or not he does, he is, like the rest of the conservative universe, pandering to the bleakest elements of our society and counting coppers as quickly as he can while trying to get a handle on what comes next. Overt racism is the wave to catch on the right these days, and Carlson is right there carving the curl as best he can.
A great many of the people who watch him do believe what he says, and we saw what they are capable of in January. Until this spigot of raw sewage is properly challenged, the poison will continue to seep into the body politic. There’s a sucker born every minute, it has been said. Tucker Carlson is out to collect them all.
Were I offered the chance, I would repeat to Carlson the words of Jon Stewart from 17 long years ago: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. Amazingly enough, it’s still not too late.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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If you’re not a Republican, you probably spent the morning grinding your teeth around your coffee. The census data is finally in, and the results as offered are galling for the current majority party. The combination of a raging pandemic and, it seems, some surprisingly deft meddling by the Trump administration has delivered five new House seats to bright red states, all of which came from blue states.
Adding insult to injury, according to FiveThirtyEight, is this: “With legislatures and commissions all over the country about to draw new congressional maps, states where Republicans have full control of the redistricting process added two seats on net (four seats gained, two lost). Meanwhile, the few states where Democrats wield the redistricting pen subtracted one seat on net (one gained, two lost).”
There is, of course, no guarantee that those new red-state seats will go to a Republican, but with GOP legislatures in those states in charge of drawing the district maps, odds of a Democratic pickup are fantastically long. Mr. Gerry, your mander is waiting.
Overall, state-lever Republican legislatures will have control over the redrawing of 187 congressional districts nationwide, more than twice as many as the Democrats, who will control the redrawing of 75 districts. The redrawing of 167 districts will be controlled by neither party, and six districts will not be redrawn at all. With House Democrats already clinging to a tiny majority, these numbers make the ’22 midterms fraught with electoral peril.
The top page of the political fallout report is straightforward: Power has once again shifted to the South, along with the population growth that brings new seats to a state. Texas and Florida won big — Texas picked up two seats from this census, and Florida gained one. New York State narrowly lost one seat, and California lost a seat for the first time in its 170-year history. States with diminishing populations such as West Virginia also lost representation.
How did this happen? Three reasons stand out.
First, and by the available numbers, the U.S. over the last decade saw the lowest overall population growth since the Great Depression, at 7.4 percent. “Experts say that paltry pace reflects the combination of an aging population, slowing immigration and the scars of the Great Recession more than a decade ago,” reports the Associated Press, “which led many young adults to delay marriage and families.”
A movement of workers to Sun Belt cities also played a part, and may be a thread of good news for Democrats: These are the voters who made the ’18 and ’20 contests so close in suburban areas like those surrounding Houston and Phoenix.
The second reason was COVID, period. As with every other aspect of life over the last 14 months, the pandemic threw a whole bag of monkey wrenches into the census process. Some people complete the census online, others fill out the mailer that got sent to their homes, but millions of people are best reached by census workers knocking on doors in poor, rural and immigrant communities and counting noses. The pandemic made reaching many marginalized communities difficult at best, and dangerous at worst. Note well that COVID became overwhelming because the Trump administration refused to take the necessary steps to contain it.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, former President Donald Trump and his administration labored mightily to disrupt and destroy the census process at every turn. For an administration noted for its aversion to hard work, they sure put the hours in trying to blow up the count.
There was the attempted addition of a citizenship question to the census, a flatly racist and illegal move made clear by the fact that the Constitution requires an accounting of “residents,” not “citizens.” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross interfered with the census deadline dates with some help from a right-leaning Supreme Court, which allowed the Commerce Department to end the census earlier than planned.
Did former senior policy adviser Stephen Miller or someone like him get in Trump’s ear and convince him a COVID-disrupted census would serve him and his party? We will likely never know, but even the most cursory examination makes it clear Trump’s nihilistic reaction to the pandemic was at least partly intentional.
“Make no mistake, this is not simply a malicious and undemocratic move ahead of an election,” CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Krish O’Mara Vignarajah told NBC News as this fight was unfolding in early August. “Its impact is real and will be felt devastatingly so for a decade by communities that have been marginalized since the dawn of the nation. Immigrants are people and must be afforded the opportunity to be counted. We cannot go back to the time in our country where people were not counted as full human beings.”
Here, again, is evidence that the influence of the Trump administration will echo down the halls of history far longer than the four years they spent tearing the place up. Between then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s court-packing and Trump’s disruption of the census, a Trump-devoted minority in this country will continue to wield a level of influence belied by its size.
Then again, 74 million people looked over the wreckage of Trump’s four years and said, “More, please,” last November. Compounding that grim fact, Republicans at the state level have done a far better job at bunkering into their power bases than Democrats over the last 20 years, and moments like this are when those efforts yield fruit. There is, however, some cold comfort in the fact that a number of experts expected GOP gains from this census to be far more significant.
These are the numbers a corrupted and disrupted census process has delivered. These numbers reveal the vast influence of authoritarians, racists and a virus deliberately left unchecked. They are also numbers that reflect a far more right-leaning country than we knew, after those 74 million voters raised their hands. It is entirely dispiriting, but perhaps after everything we have seen, not so terribly surprising in the end.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Last year, on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden released a $750 billion, 10-year plan designed to massively expand the reach of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It would create a public option, allow undocumented immigrants to buy into that public option, lower the age at which Americans become eligible for Medicare, take Medicaid expansion into the 12 Republican heartland states that chose not to expand it themselves, and permit Americans to buy prescription drugs from overseas at a cheaper cost.
Since assuming office, such sweeping health care ambitions have taken a back-burner to getting COVID relief passed, to developing a large-scale infrastructure plan, and to initiating a reset on environmental policy. But that doesn’t mean there is less urgency to lock into place big-picture health insurance changes. After all, the Biden administration inherited a barn-on-fire situation from the previous president, and we are still in the middle of a pandemic.
There are, in 2021, more than 2 million low-income American adults who live in states that didn’t expand Medicaid, and who can’t access private insurance on the exchanges because their income is deemed too low to qualify for tax credits. Of these 2 million, more than a third live in Texas. All told, by the middle of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, about 30 million non-elderly Americans remained without insurance. That’s down from 48 million in 2010, but it’s up from 28 million at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. The increased numbers of uninsured in the years from 2017 to now are the clear result of former President Donald Trump’s effort to eviscerate his predecessor’s central legislative accomplishment and make it ever-harder for Americans to enroll in the subsidized insurance plans.
From 2017 through to January 20, 2021, health care advocates had to play defense pretty much all the time. From day one of his administration, Trump, with the full backing of most of the GOP, had the ACA, known more popularly as Obamacare, in his sights. In his first months in office, the Senate came within one vote of rolling back the legislation that had created the ACA. It was that one vote, cast by an ailing Sen. John McCain against dismantling the ACA, that fueled Trump’s loathing for, and mockery of, the dying Arizonan.
After Republicans failed in Congress to repeal the ACA, Trump sought to kill it by a thousand cuts: to make it harder for patients to enroll on health care exchanges, to limit Medicaid expansion, to cut funding for outreach campaigns to educate people on how to enroll. Finally, having failed to destroy the program this way, Trump’s administration decided to side with Texas and other GOP states in their Hail-Mary lawsuit attempting to have the entire thing declared unconstitutional.
That case was heard by the Supreme Court last year, and a decision on it should come down in the next few months. Given the extraordinarily conservative composition of today’s Supreme Court, it’s at least possible — though perhaps not likely, given previous rulings on the issue — that they’ll end up taking a judicial axe to the entire project.
Which is why it’s all the more vital that, in the interim, state and federal officials work to expand the ACA as rapidly as possible. After all, the more people are covered, and the more the ACA is seen to be an indispensable, life-saving pillar of the country’s health care delivery edifice, the harder it will be to pull the rug out from under it. Given that neither party seems likely to push for a more rational, more equitable universal health care system anytime soon, ironing out the kinks in the ACA and expanding its reach seem to represent the best short-term path toward near-universal coverage.
An ACA expansion would inevitably still fall short of a truly universal, single-payer system, and it would do little to address systemic problems such as over-billing and the profiteering of middle-men institutions, which go hand in hand with for-profit insurance systems as a primary delivery system for medical services. But it would, nevertheless, bring additional millions of uninsured Americans under health care umbrellas.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration extended the special enrollment period for the ACA insurance exchange through August 15 of this year, arguing that, because of the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, it was imperative to make it as easy as possible for Americans to find affordable health insurance coverage. California and other states with their own exchanges also followed suit in keeping enrollment open.
The result of this has been encouraging: In the first weeks of the special enrollment period, well over 200,000 people signed up for coverage, eclipsing, by orders of magnitude, the numbers from the first weeks of earlier special enrollments. Hundreds of thousands more have begun the application process to get insurance via these exchanges; and additional tens of thousands have been declared eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Moreover, the latest COVID relief package in Congress freed up billions of dollars to increase subsidies to lower-income people buying coverage on the state exchanges. In many cases, premiums for people around the country will be cut in half. And in some states, funds will be used to essentially eliminate premiums for poorer residents. In California’s case, for example, this means an additional $3 billion for subsidies. As a result, come May, some low-income Californians will be paying only $1 per month for their health insurance. Hoping to get more Californians to take up insurance through the exchange, the state will spend $20 million on an outreach and advertising campaign promoting the new lower rates.
For a state that has already managed to cut its uninsured population from about 17 percent down to roughly 7 percent, all of this is a huge deal. Combine it with the ongoing efforts to expand Medi-Cal to cover all low-income undocumented adults, and one sees a road-map being drawn in California that would, over the coming years, get the state as close to having universal coverage as possible given the nature of the current U.S. health insurance system.
Where California goes on health care coverage, the nation might one day follow – especially with California’s former Attorney General Xavier Becerra now in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and pushing an emphasis on health equity and public health readiness. Already, California has self-funded Medicaid expansion to include young undocumented adults up to the age of 26. Quite possibly, later this year the state may expand the expansion to include a much larger proportion of the undocumented population. This jibes well with the proposals then-candidate Biden put out on the campaign trail. Hopefully, once California paves the way, Biden and the Democratically controlled Congress will follow through on their health care commitments at a federal level too.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Images and video coming out of India today verge on the apocalyptic. Nearly 350,000 new COVID-19 infections are being recorded daily, and the number of those who have died has rocketed into the thousands. Overwhelmed and exhausted medical professionals claim the true death toll from this new wave in India is far higher than the official count. Other experts argue the death toll could actually be 10 times higher than what is being reported.
Pyres for the dead burn in open lots, parks and even on sidewalks across the capital city of New Delhi, themselves a leading indicator of the crisis: Like oxygen, protective gear and effective anti-COVID medicine, wood for funeral fires is running low in India.
India is subsumed today in a chaos that has nearly overtaken a number of nations as COVID has made its long burn into its second year. Italy was pounded at the outset of the pandemic, and Brazil is currently #3 in the world for total infections. France, Russia, Great Britain, Turkey, Spain and Germany have endured more than 3 million infections each. At the top of the list stands the United States, followed by India.
As with the U.K., Brazil and now the U.S., it is a variant of COVID-19 that is tearing through the Indian population. “This variant — officially known as B.1.617 — was first detected in India in October,” reports the BBC.
This variant has teeth; when it went bad in India, it went bad damned fast. “India was reporting fewer than 15,000 daily infections as recently as early March” reports Forbes. “However, loosened restrictions that led to the resumption of large, unmasked gatherings contributed to a rapid rise in cases, as has a devastating new variant of the coronavirus. Many experts believe the B.1.617 variant, or the ‘double mutant,’ has inflamed the country’s catastrophic second wave.”
India is home to some 1.4 billion people. The U.S., by comparison, is populated by slightly more than 331 million people. Despite having roughly a quarter of India’s population, the U.S. has endured more than double the number of infections, though India may catch up, with more than 300,000 new infections per day.
Why have these countries taken such a terrible beating during this pandemic? It is the oldest, and most thoroughly predictable, story of this pandemic: “loosened restrictions that led to…” etc. We’ve seen authoritarian rulers — Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and until recently Donald Trump in the U.S. — steadfastly refuse to accept the realities of COVID, promote loosened restrictions at the worst possible moments, and inevitably oversee massive spikes in infections caused by entirely predicted variants. Lather rinse repeat.
With President Biden in office since January, there can be no denying that the situation in the U.S. has changed dramatically for the better. Vaccines are flying into the arms of those willing to get them, though more than five million people have thus far skipped the second shot required by the Pfizer and Moderna protocols, and millions more are balking for right-leaning political reasons. Hospitals that reeled on the verge of collapse have stabilized, many people are taking the mask/social distancing recommendations seriously, and while daily infections still soar past 60,000, the number of deaths from COVID in the U.S. has significantly diminished. We are close to having more vaccine than we actually need.
We are, in other words, in a strong position to help nations like India. Over the weekend, reports began erupting about the pressure being put on the Biden administration to help this long-time ally and strategic partner. “Biden administration officials are coming under increasing pressure to lift restrictions on exports of supplies that vaccine makers in India say they need to expand production amid a devastating surge in Covid-19 deaths there,” reported the New York Times.
On Thursday, during President Biden’s global environmental summit, the administration was pressed on its failure to act in regards to India. State Department spokesman Ned Price replied by stating the nation’s top priority is vaccinating itself first, a hollow echo of the prior administration’s priorities. “It’s of course not only in our interest to see Americans vaccinated,” Mr. Price said. “It’s in the interests of the rest of the world to see Americans vaccinated.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders profoundly disagrees with what he and others have come to call the U.S.’s vaccine apartheid. “We must do everything humanly possible to crush this global pandemic and save millions of people who are in danger of needlessly dying,” Sanders said at a virtual event hosted by Public Citizen on Friday. “Ending this pandemic requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy. It requires a different mindset… the mindset that tells the pharmaceutical industry that saving perhaps millions of lives is more important than protecting their already excessive profits. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”
“On Friday,” reports Mike Ludwig for Truthout, “Sanders and other leading Democrats joined more than a dozen public health, labor and faith organizations in delivering a petition with two million signatures to Biden demanding the U.S. drop its opposition to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization. Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Tammie Baldwin and seven other Democratic senators sent a letter urging Biden to support the TRIPS waiver earlier this month.”
The foot-dragging was not relegated to the Biden administration. Tech billionaire and self-styled COVID expert Bill Gates, whose vast fortune relies largely on intellectual property rights, thinks helping poor countries by lifting intellectual property protections on vaccines and other COVID-related medications is a bad idea. Try to contain your shock, friends.
Fury in the face of this reluctance to assist India and other nations because of pharmaceutical industry financial considerations has been swift and severe. Will Bunch, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, gave voice to that rage in a Sunday column: “No one can deny there has been an urgent need to inoculate America — an epicenter of the world pandemic for more than a year — but at this moment where vaccine hesitancy in Trump-y red states and counties is becoming a bigger U.S. problem than vaccine supply, Team Biden has been painfully slow to switch to a … humanitarian mode. In [State Dept. spokesman] Price’s words, it’s hard not to hear a phrase that has dragged down our nation since Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. America First.”
The pushback finally motivated the Biden administration to act, though not nearly to the degree advocates like Sen. Sanders were hoping for. According to NBC News, the administration will “immediately provide raw materials for Covid-19 vaccines, medical equipment and protective gear to help India respond to a massive surge in coronavirus infections…. The United States was also is pursuing options to provide India with oxygen generation and related supplies.”
On Tuesday, in response to the outcry, the Biden administration announced that it would “begin sharing its entire pipeline of vaccines from AstraZeneca once the COVID-19 vaccine clear federal safety reviews, with as many as 60 million doses expected to be available for export in the coming month,” according to the Associated Press.
While the decision to share the AstraZeneca vaccine is welcome news, the TRIPS waiver was not included in the administration’s list of actions.
It is difficult to overstate the tragedy of all this. Once again, capitalism is served before the people… or, put another way, the people are being served up to capitalism.
Mr. Biden has exceeded expectations among most progressives in his first 100 days, but this debacle is a stark reminder of the capitalist neoliberal heart still beating away at the ideological core of his administration. Mr. Biden is wrong to delay sending all the help that is possible to the world, as is Gates.
This is a global calamity that requires a global response, not hiding behind the fiction of borders and the profit dreams of avarice.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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George Floyd’s family lawyer and famous civil rights attorney Ben Crump hailed the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin as “a turning point in history.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bizarrely thanked Floyd for “sacrificing [his] life for justice.” But without the video recording by a teenage bystander, the burning down of the Third Precinct station and the most mass militant movement across the U.S. in the last 50 years, Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Chief Medaria Arradondo would have more likely awarded Chauvin for his actions rather than testify against him. Chauvin had previously used force against civilians, including the killing of a man who allegedly brandished a shotgun, but remained on the force. Chauvin’s trial was striking for a number of city employees testifying against him, most of all other cops. It was clear by the end of the trial that after the mass upheaval spurred by Floyd’s death, the city of Minneapolis was more than prepared to wash its hands of Derek Chauvin — sacrificing one officer in an attempt to salvage and absolve policing as a whole.
We would be mistaken to see this as a moment that has effectively broken “the blue wall of silence.” Quite the opposite. Chauvin’s conviction is an anomaly. He is just one of seven officers to be convicted of murdering a civilian since 2005, comprising a mere 5 percent of all cases brought to trial — a figure which is itself a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of yearly police shootings. Besides the potential fear of popular unrest, the narrow judicial interpretation of excessive force that served to exculpate Darren Wilson in the murder of Michael Brown worked to convict Derek Chauvin. The prosecution argued that Chauvin used more excessive force than is acceptable for a police officer. “To be very clear, this case is called the ‘State of Minnesota vs. Derek Chauvin,’ this case is not called the ‘State of Minnesota vs. the police,” Steven Schleicher told the jury in his closing comments.
It was important for the prosecution, and the state it represented, that Chauvin be split off from the ordinary racist police violence that is a daily feature of life in the United States.
Since 2014, the growth of street rebellion and the movement for Black lives have revealed two competing visions for how the U.S. social order, and its intrinsic structural racism, can be maintained. Donald Trump threatened protesters with violence when he stated: “When the looting starts the shooting starts,” a phrase previously uttered by a long line of racists, including Eugene “Bull” Connor and George Wallace. The liberal side wants symbolic representation, performative “community partnerships” with hand-picked pro-business locals, and the occasional convicted cop.
We know which side the Biden administration is on. In the immediate wake of Chauvin’s conviction, taking a page out of Obama’s playbook, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced a sweeping Justice Department investigation into the MPD.
This news came a few days after he rolled back a Trump cap on federal oversight into police departments, or what are usually termed consent decrees. Garland’s probe will examine the MPD’s oversight, internal accountability mechanisms and training, with particular attention to the issues of discrimination and Minneapolis cops’ use of force against civilians. “Building trust between the community and law enforcement will take time and effort by all of us,” Garland concluded, “but we undertake this task with determination and urgency, knowing that change cannot wait.”
Such DOJ reports can be useful sources of information. The agency’s 2015 investigation of Ferguson, Missouri, shed considerable light on the predatory policing practices that Black Ferguson residents had to deal with on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it is one thing to investigate a problem, and another thing to do anything about it. It is worth considering that the DOJ under Barack Obama, even when feeling the heat post-Ferguson, did not prosecute a single cop for shooting a Black person. Of course, as we’ve noted in relation to Chauvin, prosecuting cops will not actually stop the violence of policing, but it’s worth noting that the DOJ is not even taking action on its own carceral terms.
With Biden in power, it is safe to assume that we will see more consent decrees in the near future. And when it comes to police reform in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, what we can expect from the DOJ will most assuredly be old wine in new jars.
The city of Minneapolis itself is a case in point. The abolitionist group MPD 150 has situated the slew of failed police reforms in the wider historical context of widespread corruption, violence and white supremacy. Before the Minneapolis Police Department became notorious around the world for the death of George Floyd, it was the site of aggressive police reform. In 2015, in the wake of Ferguson, the MPD was one of six police jurisdictions selected as part of the Obama Justice Department’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative. Then, as now, the federal government was responding post festum, not to a police shooting — a daily occurrence in the United States — but to the riotous rebellion that a police shooting had engendered. Over the course of three years, the federal government spent $4.75 million to create an “evidence-based” protocol for repairing relations between police officers like Derek Chauvin and Minneapolis citizens like George Floyd.
The MPD was led at the time by Chief Janeé Harteau, who had taken over in 2012 as a self-professed reformer. However, a 2015 DOJ investigation found the department was not disciplining abusive officers, as routine practice up and down the chain of command evaded any substantive accountability. Cops whose actions could not simply be ignored were sent to special training, consisting of reading the police manual aloud.
Nonetheless, Harteau worked with the federal government, introducing “MPD 2.0: A New Police Model,” meant to shift the department to a model of “community policing.” Community policing is a suspect concept. “The first thing that nearly all proponents of community policing say about community policing,” write David Correia and Tyler Wall in Police: A Field Guide, “is that there’s no definition of community policing.” Instead, it means just about anything that involves police interacting with the people they police, and has proven a lucrative source of federal funding for departments willing to classify the ordinary police work of street patrols and cultivating strategic relationships among the populations they police under the jargon of community policing.
Much of what the DOJ is not investigating was already investigated — and modified — during this time. In 2016, Harteau oversaw the MPD’s redrafting of its “use of force” policies. In a further detail that stands out in the wake of Floyd’s death, the department mandated that officers intervene to prevent their fellow cops from using excessive force. The revision of policy also included the usual verbiage on avoiding bias, procedural justice and so-called crisis intervention. All of this had been done already when Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, while his three cop accomplices prevented passersby from saving Floyd’s life.
The summer of 2020 saw people all across the U.S. taking direct action against the police violence endemic to structural racism in the United States. The people of Minneapolis setting fire to the Third Precinct station, and the nationwide rebellion this catalyzed, are to thank for the conviction of Derek Chauvin. By contrast, the empty proceduralism of the DOJ will not put a stop to police killings in the U.S., just as years of police reform in Minneapolis did not save George Floyd.
It is only by deepening and radicalizing the mass movement against the violence of policing — and the structurally racist social order which policing upholds — that we can reverse the grisly tide of civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. police.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Since 2018, hundreds of new sanctions targeting the civilian economy have been imposed on the people of North Korea. In 2018 alone, new and existing sanctions caused almost 4,000 preventable civilian deaths. Around 11 million North Koreans are deprived of sufficient access to basic foodstuffs, clean drinking water or essential medical services.
Subjected to ever-increasing sanctions, North Korea is projected to suffer a food deficit of 1.3. million tons this year, worsening the already dire condition endured by a broad swath of the population. More than 40 percent of North Korea’s 25 million people are considered chronically food insecure, and one out of every five children under the age of 5 is impacted by stunted growth. The latest UN Human Rights Council report highlights “deaths by starvation” as well as “an increase in the number of children and elderly people who have resorted to begging.”
Few people around the world know about the extent of this human suffering. Reports of the ongoing humanitarian tragedy have n ot been given the attention they deserve because of the saturation of negative media coverage of North Korea, which is dominated by reports on the country’s nuclear program. The human side of the conflict is given short shrift, with little attention devoted to either the effectiveness or the human cost of economic sanctions.
While it goes without saying that the North Korean government bears the primary responsibility for the welfare of its people, it is important to note the extraordinary nature of U.S.-drafted UN sanctions — as well as unilateral U.S. sanctions — which by design inflict catastrophic impact on people in North Korea.
Take, for instance, the vast expansion of existing UN sanctions targeting North Korea’s civilian economy, which were initiated by President Obama and subsequently escalated by the Trump administration. These U.S.-authored restrictions were touted by the Trump administration as “the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country,” and include restrictions on oil and petroleum product imports, devastating the civilian and household economy and triggering an energy shortage that has reduced the reach of the country’s already spotty supply of electricity to less than a quarter of households. This past winter, millions of ordinary North Koreans endured extreme winter temperatures as low as 3 degrees Fahrenheit without reliable heating or electricity.
The new sanctions also prohibit the import of foodstuffs and critical agricultural components, openly violating the 1977 Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, which specifically forbids any action that erodes agricultural production, “whatever the motive.” Unsurprisingly, precipitous drops in agricultural production have occurred as a result. Food has become increasingly scarce, causing more than 1 million additional North Korean civilians to slip into food insecurity as a result of the restrictions on food and agricultural imports. The increasing scarcity of even basic food items disproportionately impacts the poor, the sick and elderly, as well as newborns.
In addition to strangling the flow of critical civilian imports, these sanctions also ban 90 percent of North Korea’s exports, including minerals, seafood and textiles, impacting hundreds of thousands of ordinary North Koreans employed in these industries — particularly women, who make up the bulk of the workforce in these sectors.
The dire situation created by these U.S.-drafted UN sanctions are exacerbated by the unilateral sanctions imposed by Washington, which allow the U.S. Treasury to block anyone doing business with North Korea from accessing the U.S. financial system. This has caused a shortage of much-needed foreign currency, and further contributed to food insecurity by reducing incomes while raising the cost of food.
Unilateral U.S. sanctions have also incapacitated the NGOs and UN agencies running the humanitarian programs that provide life-saving aid to more than 13 million vulnerable North Koreans. They delay exemptions and block imports of critical medical supplies, such as catheters and needles, increasing easily preventable hospital-related deaths, such as mothers dying as a result of childbirth. According to the Enhancing North Korea Humanitarian Assistance Act, even the laptops and administrative supplies used by humanitarian workers in North Korea are subject to sanctions, which have created an insurmountable barrier of red tape for humanitarian organizations.
While the UN Human Rights Council has repeatedly recommended the removal of “sanctions that negatively affect people’s human rights” in North Korea, any attempt to lift or even reduce the impact of sanctions has consistently been met with steadfast opposition in Washington. In recent years, the weaponization of sanctions, hunger and human suffering has come to be regarded as a means to force denuclearization on North Korea, signaling the final devolution of state policy into extortion. Take, for instance, John Bolton’s warning to the Biden administration against lifting sanctions:
North Korea is weaker today than perhaps ever before in its history…. This is hardly the time to relieve the pressure of economic sanctions and international isolation. This is the time to demand concessions from Pyongyang.
Does the United States have the right to implement a policy of inflicting deliberate harm on the weak and vulnerable based on the cold calculus that doing so will increase its foreign policy leverage? Should the fate of children, the sick and the elderly be used as bargaining chips to induce concessions from their government? Any policy designed to reduce access to basic foodstuffs, life-saving medical supplies and humanitarian aid appears to be consciously targeted to this end.
The Geneva Convention labels such actions as crimes against humanity during wartime — a significant nuance since the 70-year-old Korean War is technically ongoing. Continuing a sanctions regime that is, by design, based on collective punishment violates international norms.
U.S. policies that aim to undermine regime security in North Korea by imposing costs on its powerless population are wrongheaded in the extreme. Even as these brutal sanctions have caused widespread and significant human suffering, they have failed to achieve any progress whatsoever with respect to U.S. foreign policy goals.
As the Biden administration completes its North Korea policy review in the coming weeks, it needs to realize that weaponized misery and collective punishment is neither ethically acceptable nor an effective tool of statecraft — it’s a form of collective punishment that should never be considered. Before the current humanitarian crisis spirals further out of control, the U.S. must return to the politics of engagement and diplomacy, which offer the only consistent path to rapprochement, stability and peace in the Korean Peninsula.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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While the toxic weed killer Paraquat, branded by Syngenta as Gramoxone, is part of the daily routine for many agricultural workers across the country, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns users on a government website that one small accidental sip can be fatal and there is no antidote. Regulators in the United States are grappling with a wave of research linking Paraquat to a less immediately apparent effect — Parkinson’s disease. And Syngenta — the Swiss-headquartered, Chinese-owned agrochemical company that now manufactures the weed killer — is currently facing litigation on that issue, though it denies responsibility.
Although first synthesized in 1882, Paraquat was not widely used as a herbicide until the middle of the 20th century. Today, though, it is used in more than 120 countries on more than 100 crops, including soybeans, wheat, rice, bananas, oranges, coffee and sugar cane. It gained notoriety after the United States government paid to have it sprayed on cannabis fields in Mexico during the late 1970s. One study conducted in 1978 found that 21 percent of the marijuana samples tested were found to be contaminated with the herbicide Paraquat.
According to a study published in Environmental Health, Paraquat is implicated in around 100 poisoning incidents in the U.S. each year, resulting in at least 17 deaths by acute poisoning over the last 20 years. As a result of its deadliness, more than 60 countries have already banned Paraquat, including Switzerland, the home base of the Paraquat maker Syngenta, which has banned the chemical since 1989. However, it is still popular and accessible to farmers in many countries, including the United States, and the toll from Paraquat poisonings is estimated at well into the thousands.
As more evidence emerges that gene alterations are involved in the early onset of Parkinson’s disease, the role of highly hazardous pesticides in the pathogenesis of this disease becomes intensely debated. In 2011, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, in association with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, published results from a case-control study of Parkinson’s disease cases in relation to pesticide exposure, and Paraquat emerged as a significant concern.
Syngenta states it is just one of the hundreds of companies worldwide that have registered Paraquat for sale. But now, hundreds of internal corporate documents, which date back to 1968, detail how the need for a safer formulation of Syngenta’s popular Paraquat-based product Gramoxone has been the subject of in-depth company discussions for decades. Analysis and data over the issue, as well as the arguments about the accuracy of evidence presented to regulators to avoid bans, are now laid out in the records. The Paraquat documents exclusively analyzed by Public Eye together with Unearthed, Greenpeace U.K.’s investigative journalism unit, show that the agrochemical giant and its predecessor corporate entities rejected or resisted many different options for changes to the formulations of Gramoxone on cost grounds and due to a desire to protect profits.
On March 24, 2021, Jon Heylings, formerly the head of research and investigative toxicology at Syngenta, claimed that the company did not want to change the formulation of Gramoxone to make it less dangerous. That same day, Syngenta denied Heylings’s claims.
Due to its toxicity, Paraquat sold in the U.S. is dyed blue to keep it from being mistaken for beverages and other liquid consumables; its sharp odor serves as a warning, and it includes a substance that induces vomiting when ingested. At the heart of the matter is a chemical compound codenamed PP796, an emetic that reduces the product’s toxicity by triggering rapid vomiting in people who ingest it. If the vomiting happens fast enough, the theory goes, it possibly could rid people’s bodies of the poison before a fatal dose can be absorbed into the bloodstream.
Heylings told the company more of the additive was needed in order to obtain the intended emetic effect, but his concerns were rejected, and a product that could have made Paraquat less deadly was shelved, according to the Paraquat documents. After raising the issue within the company for the first time in 1990, Heylings recently renewed his push for the pesticide giant to acknowledge his concerns.
After studying the emetic effects of PP796 on experimental animals, the company eventually settled on a dose of 5mg per 10ml of Gramoxone, and research supporting that dose was submitted to regulators. However, data based on more reliable laboratory testing would show that the amount of emetic in Gramoxone was too low to prevent fatal poisonings. Heylings accuses his former employer and Syngenta’s predecessor companies of relying on data generated in the 1970s that misrepresented the amount of the emetic additive that could potentially make Gramoxone less deadly.
Today, the most common causes of Paraquat exposure come from swallowing the chemical, prolonged contact with the skin or inhalation. Victims may be exposed to the toxic effects of the herbicide if the chemical directly enters the body through a cut, scrape, sore or rash.
A wide variety of studies have linked Paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease, including epidemiological reviews that have looked at human disease patterns, studies involving experiments on rats and research examining toxicity on a cellular level. Symptoms of the disease, such as tremors and slowed movement, stem from a loss of nerve cells in a part of the brain.
Ethan W.* began fieldwork picking cotton on the West Coast 10 years ago when he was 28. Now at age 38, he has developed adverse health effects, which have been caused by his prolonged exposure to pesticides. “The majority of the damage was to my brain and central nervous system; my cognitive functions began to deteriorate, along with my eyesight, balance, and a host of other related symptoms. I was told I am now at high risk to acquire Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, or other neurological disorder,” Ethan said. “Doctors assumed that I would never drive again, go back to work or even be able to care for myself, let alone take care of my then 8-year-old daughter.” Although cotton pickers are not involved in pesticide spraying, they are exposed to residual effects of pesticides applied on the cotton crop.
The emotional burden of Parkinson’s disease is oftentimes overshadowed by the financial burden sustained by the patient and the family, and that is one reason why, currently, farmworkers who have developed this degenerative disorder as a result of Paraquat exposure are filing claims for compensation. In addition to helping victims’ efforts to recover the money to which they are entitled, specialized attorneys can hold the negligent manufacturing, distributing and marketing entities liable for their actions, and send a message that poisoning people cannot be tolerated.
In the United States, Paraquat use is growing exponentially, so that concern is sensible. To prevent future problems, the EPA should be concerned about this exposure and work to strengthen the current rules; we owe it to these workers to have the best standards for pesticides. Yet, the federal agency is still weighing whether to continue allowing the chemical to be sprayed on U.S. cropland. Delaying and derailing regulations leave the health of an estimated 3 million farmworkers in the United States at risk.
*Due to client confidentiality purposes, Ethan’s full name cannot be provided.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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On Sunday, April 11, a cop pulled Daunte Wright over for air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror and expired tags. Then she murdered him, saying she couldn’t tell her gun from her taser. The killing happened 20 minutes down the road from where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck.
Protests have erupted night after night since then, in Brooklyn Center where Wright was murdered and beyond. The repression by the mayor and governor has been savage. On Friday the 16th, for example, the Minnesota National Guard and the cops beat and gassed the protesters against police violence, shot them with rubber bullets, and then the cops arrested over 100 people. The National Guard had already been stationed in nearby Minneapolis and St. Paul as part of Operation Safety Net, calling up the Guard alongside the police and others to prevent or stop another anti-cop uprising during the Chauvin trial.
But two days before Friday’s attack, union members took things into their own hands. A unit of the National Guard was using the St. Paul Labor Federation Center as a staging area for launching attacks against protesters. A single union local president gave them permission to use the building, even though the building is used by dozens of locals. When union activists heard, they converged on the Center to push back.
Members of the Communications Workers of America, Minnesota Nurses Association, United Brotherhood of Carpenters, and other unions rejected the undemocratic decision and demanded that the Guard leave — an act of radical solidarity with the anti-racist protestors. A rank and filer from UNITE HERE points out that the union members didn’t just question the Guard’s presence They started pushing the Guard — with members from working class and oppressed neighborhoods — to question what side they’re on and what class they serve: “Do you feel what you’re doing now is remotely close to helping people?” When the Guard drove off in its armored cars, they did it to chants of “Whose house? Our house!” and “What kind of power? Union power!”
The Guard’s eviction set off a small furor.
Labor Leaders Duck for Cover
Walz, the Democratic Party-aligned governor, stood shoulder to shoulder with Republicans and scolded the action as “unacceptable.” He’s the same racist politician who ordered the Guard to brutally quash the protests against killer cops last summer. Then, the Republican-led state senate passed a resolution heaping praise on the Guard, condemning the union members’ action and demanding punishment.
Some union leaders followed suit. Jamie McNamara, the Business Manager and Financial Secretary of the IBEW Local 10, also scolded the union activists. Along with the Minnesota State Building and Construction Trades Council, he called the National Guard working class saviors.
Kera Peterson, president of the St. Paul Regional AFL-CIO Federation, tried to split the difference between support and kowtowing to the political leaders. She wound up making a bewildering statement saying the Federation supports racial justice while also apologizing to the Guard gassing and shooting anti-racist protesters. William McCarthy, president of Minnesota’s statewide AFL-CIO, also tried to find a harmless compromise, and made a tepid statement that refuses to say anything or take any side at all.
The National Guard Isn’t Your Friend
But the National Guard isn’t some kind, peace-keeping force that keeps the “community” safe. For example, the Guard uses tear gas — a chemical weapon that the ruling class itself banned from use in war. According to the CDC, it can cause blindness and “immediate death due to severe chemical burns to the throat and lungs.” That’s just one constantly-used weapon in the National Guard’s “non-lethal” arsenal. And that arsenal is being used against workers and the oppressed — the people rising up against racism — to protect the killer cops that stalk Black and Brown working class neighborhoods.
This is nothing new. The National Guard has long been used as a weapon against protesters, the working class, and the oppressed. As a member of CWA 7250 pointed out:
One of the reasons that the National Guard was set up was to fight labor unions. That’s just a historical fact. The military has been used against militant strikers in this country again, again and again. They have been the armed soldiers that broke strikes.
In Ludlow, CO in 1914, the Guard slaughtered striking miners and their families. In Minneapolis in 1934, the governor used it to try to smash the Teamsters’ mass strike. In 1970 at Kent State, the Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting the Vietnam War, murdering four people. At Standing Rock in 2016, the Guard was called up against protestors of the Dakota Access Pipeline. And that same year in Philadelphia, the Guard teamed up with cops to trap, gas, and beat protesters against killer cops. This is just a sample of the Guard’s activities in the last hundred years or so.
The Guard recruits from the working class, but that does not mean our unions should kowtow to them. Like union members did the other night at the labor center, we have to defend ourselves and our movements from their attacks and call on the workers and oppressed in the Guard to desert their posts and join the fight against their real enemy: the rulers.
The Democrats Won’t Save Us
More than this, the critiques from Walz and some union bureaucrats try to take away the power of unions to fight racism, and replace it with faith in the system.
For the Democratic party, the answer is voting. This was the strategy during the massive BLM uprising last summer. It wasn’t just that Democrat-aligned governors like Walz ordered attacks on protesters against cop violence. The Democrats also co-opted the movement straight into the dumpster of the Biden campaign.
Our labor leaders in the AFL-CIO and beyond beat that same drum faithfully for Biden and the Democrats. Many are doing the same by falling in line behind the Minnesota governor. The message is the same: don’t fight back, the system will save us.
The co-opting worked. Now, the country is run by a Democrat, with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate. Minnesota is run by a governor in the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, the state’s affiliate of the Democrats. The mayors of Minneapolis and of St. Paul are in that same party. So are 12 of the 13 city council members of Minneapolis. And those Democrats constantly promise things will change, so we should all stop fighting back. We’re told Daunte Wright and George Floyd are dead because of accidents or “bad apples,” as opposed to the system that is rotten to its core.
This is the result. Cops are on pace to kill more than 1,000 people in 2021. That’s their pace every year, as it has been through all the uprisings after the murders of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and many many others.
And the murders of Wright and Floyd are just the tip of the iceberg of racism in Minnesota. The New York Times points out that, despite all the so-called “progressive” legislation in Minnesota, “the gaps between white Minnesotans and Black Minnesotans are among the widest in the country.” In other words, the politicians’ promises and policies aren’t solving the problem, they’re masking it. The Democrats won’t save us.
Boot the Guard — and Don’t Stop There
The action of these union members shows why unions must be an even greater part of the fight against killer cops.
The union activists at the St. Paul Labor Center gave us one small example, but there are others. Recently, ATU Local 1005 issued a statement that defends its bus drivers’ right to refuse to help cops repress protesters. This is a holdover from last summer, when bus drivers in several cities refused to use their busses to support the police crackdown on the BLM uprisings. Last summer, too, the ILWU shut down ports in solidarity with the BLM uprising.
These hints of worker power are small but meaningful and real. This power comes from the fact that unions are working class organizations that stand at some of the most strategic choke points of capitalism today: transportation, production, education, and healthcare. That means unions are fundamental to attacking the white supremacy capitalism needs to survive. Standing at capital’s choke points, we can squeeze.
In other words, we can refuse to transport cops or arrested protesters, and boot the national guard from our union buildings, but we can’t stop there. Kicking cops out of our unions will be key to taking away some of the protections that keep killer cops out of jail. Unions can strike, attacking the flow of the ruling class’ profits by walking off the job and demanding real social change. Teacher strikes mean kids — and a sizable number of working class parents — stay home, which can hamper the economy. We can’t forget that Adam Toledo, the 13-year-old recently murdered by a Chicago cop, was a student taught by Chicago Teacher Union members. A strike by the Chicago Teacher Union would play a major role in fighting back.
And strikes free us up to join the action in the streets. We can march alongside our class, shutting down traffic, showcasing our power, and adding numbers and protection to protesters already out there.
The ruling class can’t rule without forcing its workers to work. That means the battle against racism has to have union support, and use workers’ own weapons — walkouts and strikes, for example — to win real, lasting gains. Unions played a role in last summer’s BLM uprising, but a far too small one. That was one important reason the that the uprising ended without many lasting results.
But our unions also desperately need to join the fight against racism. White supremacy is excellent for the bosses and the ruling class as a whole. When Black and Brown people are terrorized through police murder and all the other forms of capitalist racism, the ruling class keeps the working class divided, frightened, and hyper-exploited. It’s just good business. White supremacy keeps wages down and the working class weak. We can’t beat build a powerful labor movement, and beat the bosses and capitalism, without militant anti-racism.
But anti-racist unions won’t just pop up on their own. We’ve seen enough proof that union bureaucrats will all too often sit on their hands, give tepid statements, or play lapdog to Democrats while they beg for favors. For a powerful, long-term movement that pushes our unions into militant struggle against cops and racism, the driving force has to be the rank and file organizing itself from the bottom up, like in SEIU Drop the Cops.
When the governor, his Republican friends, labor heads and others condemn the booting of the Guard, when they call for punishments against union activists like Cliff Willmeng and others — they’re dead wrong. Those workers deserve our fullest support and solidarity for helping link union power with the anti-racist fight against the cops.
There’s plenty more to do, but booting the Guard is a great step.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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This week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey re-introduced the Green New Deal. One crucial arm of it is the Green New Deal for Public Housing, a bill to rebuild and revitalize the nation’s public housing infrastructure. Momentum by lawmakers to reinvest in our existing public housing infrastructure has been building for years. Combined with President Biden’s push for a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, there is a real opportunity to rebuild our economy with the public at the forefront.
Meanwhile, the largest Wall Street players continue to do well, even in a still-struggling economy. The recent volatility in the price of GameStop stock, combined with the prevalence of easy-to-use trading apps like Robinhood, has led to a surge of interest in trading in the stock market by so-called “retail” (nonprofessional) traders. In the media narrative that followed, some proclaimed the triumph of David vs. Goliath. But the largest players on Wall Street have reaped massive rewards off the volatility. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both reported record first-quarter profits, thanks in part to massive revenues in their trading divisions.
Robinhood’s lofty marketing claims say it aims to “democratize finance.” But if we truly want to democratize our economy, it’s going to take more than a few more retail traders getting rich in the stock market while the profits of the titans of finance continue to climb. It will take committed, long-term public investments. One idea to facilitate these very investments is being considered by Congress to channel both public and private capital into public infrastructure projects.
Flipping the Script on Public-Private Investments
On April 14, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing to discuss infrastructure ideas to help realize President Biden’s “build back better” economic vision. Among the ideas discussed at the hearing was a proposal by Cornell University Law Professor Saule Omarova: a National Investment Authority that could fund public projects large and small, but also provide a way for the public to invest their money without having to rely on Wall Street.
Today, major Wall Street players act as a middle man on nearly every kind of investment. They take fees each step of the way — be it when private companies go public, cities sell bonds to fund projects, or even when the public chooses to invest in mutual funds or other financial products that aim to produce a steady return. If you’re lucky enough to be able to save for retirement, unless you buy a savings bond, whatever you do, you give Wall Street a cut. If we created a National Investment Authority, there would be a new asset class that would let savers invest purely in public projects, whether that be the Green New Deal, high-speed rail or other projects to benefit the entire country.
Another problem the National Investment Authority solves is the current funding gap we have for large-scale, long-term public projects. As Professor Omarova writes, the current approach to infrastructure funding in the United States is to “allow private markets to decide which projects are worthy of funding.” But Wall Street is generally uninterested in investing in projects that might take more than a lifetime to create profits, let alone a few years.
When Wall Street does invest in public projects, it demands tolls and fees that can guarantee near-term returns, like when Chicago leased off its parking meter system in 2008 to private investors. These investors are now on track to recoup their entire investment by 2021, and then enjoy 62 more years of profits, all paid for by the city’s residents. Meanwhile, parking meter rates doubled in the first five years, and Chicago is now contractually restricted from improving the downtown streets with the leased meters, preventing them from adding bicycle lanes or expanding sidewalks.
What happened in Chicago is just one example of so-called public-private partnerships, where cities and states sell off public assets to private actors, just to balance their budgets. But the idea of the National Investment Authority is to flip the public-private partnership script. It would compel private money to fund public projects under public control instead.
The way it would do this is by creating a new asset class, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, which would create a new financial product nearly as safe as Treasuries (U.S. government bonds widely seen by the financial markets as one of the safest, least risky investments that exist). Because of the government backing, it could not only be attractive to the general public, but even to pension funds and other long-term institutional investors who want a decent return with less risk. While there’s no reason the National Investment Authority couldn’t be solely funded with public dollars, a combination of public dollars and private investment could make it go even further.
Operationally, the National Investment Authority would be a new public entity that sits between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. It would have a dedicated mission to invest strategically in projects that would create socially inclusive, equitable and environmentally sustainable economic growth. To ensure it doesn’t stray from its mission, it would have multiple measures for accountability: a governing board, a public interest council, an audit panel and separate oversight by audits from the Government Accountability Office.
It would have two arms: an Infrastructure Bank and an agency to invest in leapfrog, moonshot-type projects. The Infrastructure Bank would issue grants, loans, insurance and more to support public infrastructure like roads, clean energy facilities and water treatment plants. The other arm would be an asset manager, with a portfolio of equity investments in environmentally safe, socially beneficial long-term projects.
There’s precedent in the United States for this kind of organized, vast investment in public projects. The National Investment Authority is a modernized version of a New Deal–era program called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. First created by President Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt grew it and used it to help the country out of the Great Depression. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation funded projects big and small, and at the time, its investments were larger than those of all of Wall Street combined. Institutions like the Small Business Administration and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which help to facilitate investment in housing by buying mortgages from lenders) are still-surviving subsidiaries of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
While the American Rescue Plan has provided a much needed short-term stimulus to the public, the future of the U.S. economy remains uncertain. Supplemental unemployment insurance and the suspension on most federal student loan payments are both due to expire in the fall. One of the lessons learned from the last financial crisis is that Wall Street actors will grab the best assets on the cheap after a market crash, leading to further dominance of our economy by a few giant, private players.
The National Investment Authority could ensure this doesn’t repeat, acting to reverse the trend toward privatization and make real investments in public projects. It’s an idea that’s popular — a majority of voters (54 percent) support the idea, according to polling by the Justice Collaborative. Combined with the president’s push for the infrastructure bill and the reintroduction of the Green New Deal, the moment seems ripe for transformational public investments.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“This is history! We took the Capitol,” yelled Greg Rubenacker, a 25-year-old from New York who Snapchatted photos of smoking weed in the rotunda. On January 6, he joined hundreds of mostly white men, who ransacked the Capitol, defecated on floors, and searched for politicians to try to kidnap or even kill. After the melee, he returned to Long Island and a month later, in February, was arrested by the FBI.
Many of the Trump loyalists who attacked the Capitol came from Democratic strongholds, where the number of white people had declined as diversity increased. Political scientist Robert A. Pape said, “More than half came from counties that Biden won.” For example, Trump backers who were later arrested for their role in the January 6 attack came from these New York ZIP codes: Farmingdale, 04344, Huntington, 11743, Bellmore, 11710, Glen Falls, 12803, Pawling, 12564, and Manhattan, 21120.
This revelation shattered the myth that the coup was incubated largely in Republican ZIP codes, and crystallized the danger of the right-wing paranoia over “replacement.”
If you live in a Democratic city, it is still possible that one of your neighbors is planning for civil war. They may own many guns. They may stay up late, scrolling far-right websites to read about the “Great Replacement theory,” which fears whites are being overtaken by people of color. The paranoid fantasy has led to violence and will cause more. The further conservatives fall into racial fearmongering, the less they can see how white supremacy fuels the systems of class exploitation that spread suffering and insecurity through white communities too.
Invasion of the Status Snatchers
When black cars pulled up to Rubenacker’s house in Long Island, it was part of an FBI sweep to capture those involved in the Capitol breach. Arrest after arrest took place not in cliché “red states,” but in deep “blue” or Democratic states and cities.
Conservatives who live in the multicultural U.S. are sometimes triggered by anxiety and transformed by ideology to become extremists. They seethe at a culture that no longer uniformly reflects them. (In reality, of course, it never did.)
They are often middle class, older and new to the extreme right. Political scientist Robert A. Pape wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post and another in The Atlantic that mapped the background of the January 6 participants. He said in The Atlantic, “the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age is 40 … and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs.” The middle-class entitlement of many of the rioters is combined with having a front-row seat to diversity. Pape explains in the Post, “Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.” The 27 people arrested in New York for breaching the Capitol came out of Democratic counties, three of them from a county that saw the white population drop.
These white racist conservatives look at change in their neighborhoods and their fear spikes. In 2017, Jennifer Richeson, Maureen Craig and Julian Rucker published an academic article titled, “The Pitfalls and Promise of Increasing Racial Diversity.” They write, “Because the increasing racial diversity in White neighborhoods, states and nations implies a smaller White population share, Whites may perceive these demographic changes as threatening to their status.” The shock comes from more than the physical presence of different people. It comes from the unnamed privileges that buttressed white status being picked apart.
The multicultural U.S. these white people fear is already here. In 2019, people of color were the majority for the cohort 16 and younger. In 2050, whites are projected to be a minority at 47 percent of the population. The friction is not caused by sheer numbers but in the challenge to the country’s white supremacy. Statues of slave owners are pulled down. Police brutality is protested. The idea of the U.S. as the “City on a Hill” has been repeatedly dismantled by historians from Howard Zinn to The New York Times “1619 Project.” As the nation abandons these harmful myths, white racist conservatives cling to nostalgia — and increasingly turn to violence.
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
“We may see an act of mass casualty terrorism sometime in the near future,” said reporter A.C. Thompson on Democracy Now! last week. “We have a massive pool of radicalized individuals who have been fed an abundance of lies by the former president, by this entire conspiratorial right-wing media and social media ecosystem.”
In Democratic cities and suburbs, white supremacists will likely continue to try to plan another civil war — or in their terms, a “boogaloo.” In Oakland, California, a Boogaloo Boi named Steven Carrillo recently killed a federal agent and a sheriff’s deputy. It is one act of violence in a swelling tide of blood. In March, the Biden administration released a report that highlighted the increasing danger of “domestic violent extremists.” Kristian Williams analyzed the report for Truthout and found it wrongly grouped people on the left and right in the same categories, papering over the fact that the right uses violence far more. The Biden administration’s report names as driving forces President Trump’s lies about election fraud, conspiracy theories and COVID-19 lockdowns, and mentions ethnic hatred but overlooks the increasing white racial anxiety over diversity. Without acknowledging that element, any response to extremism will fall short.
We saw this rage leave pain its wake. It was Dylann Roof shooting 12 people, killing nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It was Robert Bowers killing 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was Kyle Rittenhouse — a supporter of “Blue Lives Matter” and Donald Trump — murdering two men and injuring a third in the Black Lives Matters protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It is the beating of Asian Americans in the street, in broad daylight.
Racist violence is surging and the conditions are in place for ongoing — and even escalating — violence to resist the “Great Replacement.”
The Poverty of Hatred
I have witnessed white rage my whole life. In the 1980s, it was my friend’s uncle claiming he couldn’t get a job because he was a white man. In the ‘90s, it was being in class with white college students angry that they were being “blamed” for everything. In the 2000s, it’s been the election of Trump and the harmful myths that “cancel culture” is destroying white jobs and that Black Lives Matter protests are coming to burn down white homes.
What I never understood was how they never saw the cost of white supremacy. I saw them vote for Republicans who broke their unions, fought hiking the minimum wage, fought universal health care, fought free college, and fought increasing social services in any way, shape or form. The reality is that white supremacy comes at the cost of a broad-based, interracial working-class radicalism that could have saved the lives of many white people too. Cornel West made this truth plain in a 2018 speech when he said, “White working class brotha, we know you have pain, we know it’s difficult to get access to a job with a living wage … what we’re asking you to confront the most powerful, not scapegoat the most vulnerable.”
I remember hearing my friend’s grandfather, dying in the bedroom, breathing through a ventilator because they could not afford treatment. I get calls from a former partner, who lives out of a van in abandoned fields with her child because they can’t afford rent. The whiteness that the Proud Boys or Ku Klux Klan or Oath Keepers or Nazis fight so hard to protect comes with a price. Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness and Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone detail how racism justifies policies that are deadly for people of every race. Metzl points out how the Republican fetish for guns as a sign of white freedom results in heart-breaking levels of gun suicides. McGhee shows how the racial and class stigma attached to Medicaid leaves poor whites to die.
We’re approaching a turning point where the reality of diversity crashes against the crumbling edifice of white supremacy. If the Great Replacement fantasy continues, we’ll continue to lurch from mass shootings to violent coup attempts to racist and antisemitic tiki torch parades.
It’s time for us all to confront the future of violent racist backlash that is already looming. Living in a Democratic ZIP code or a multicultural city doesn’t protect you from the hatred that is brewing. This is not a problem located far away or in another state. It’s all around us.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
